Well, here's the history of Funhouse # 50003 573937's recovery.
It lived the end of its commercial life in the student union gameroom at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an engineering school near Albany NY.
Joseph Nebus first mentioned it being in the gameroom in '94, according to a
rec.games.pinball article which is available from Google's newsgroup archive.
Then all the machines in the gameroom got
cleaned over the Christmas break...
here might be another post (8/25/96) from the same guy, with a comment on the lack of maintenance.
He later described
the condition of the game on 12/12/96.
One
more, from when the game actually left the building (1/17/97).
The game was offered to me as a parts machine in September 1996. In January
of 1997, Joseph mentioned the Funhouse had been taken out of the RPI arcade.
Sometime in June I caught up with it, to find it had been sitting quietly in
the back room at the arcade I was purchasing it from. It wasn't until August
of 1997 that I got my hands on the game. Still, for the price (I gave him $100)
it's considerably better than a parts machine. Probably not worth the time and
effort it would take for a professional to fix it up, but for a home-use machine
and a pinhead with some spare time available, it's a deal.