Home Haunts 

Home haunters create a (friendly) nightmare on your street.

They scare because they care. They are the home haunters. That is, regular folks in regular neighborhoods who build spooky mazes for Halloween in the yards of their regular suburban homes. Home haunts are often family run, family friendly and free, or at least they ask for a small donation to a charity. 

For the people who seek them out, it can be a friendly, cost-effective way to enhance the Halloween season. And for a lot of haunters, it starts as something personal. 

“I have always had a penchant for the dark and weird,” says Liam Ferris, owner and operator of the Ferris Haunt in Garden Grove, alongside his young son, Oliver. “I actually have no idea where it came from, but I’ve always been that way. I started as a home haunter back in the late ’80s at my mom’s house. Our neighbor was a set painter for the movie studios, so not only did he have great skill for designing and painting sets, he had access to all kinds of amazing movie props. He let me use his black lights, props and whatever he had laying around.”

Teacher Christina Lopez runs Deadly Diana’s Place in Fullerton, a long-running home haunt popular with her young students.  

“My obsession with everything Halloween started as a young child,” Lopez says. “My mother loved Halloween and would create a great Beelzebub costume for me each year. My husband and I started haunting out the front yard. It has grown to now include our front yard, garage, side of our house and backyard.” 

Irvine’s Kim Home Haunt, now in its sixth year, was created for family togetherness. 

“As my kids got older, they started growing out of the trick-or-treat phase, and just disappeared with friends, leaving an empty house,” says Tony Kim. “My wife and daughter started a modest haunted [house] and found not only our kids, but all of their friends wanted to be involved. Every year it has grown and become a neighborhood tradition. Dozens of teens volunteer to scare, greet and help with logistics. As a family, it has become our biggest event of the year and we have many fond — and scary — memories.”

Home haunts can take a lot of work to pull off year in and year out, however, once most haunters start their own event, it can become an obsession.

“It is always on your mind,” Lopez says. “We see trash on the side of the road and think what kind of creep prop can I make out of that? I have created a guillotine, cages, trap doors, creepy trees, body parts, jump scare boxes and many other items from discarded junk. This year, Deadly Diana’s haunted manor is filled with antique furniture I found in the trash.”

The haunters say their haunts wouldn’t work without family teamwork and neighborhood support. But to create family-friendly events also takes balance. 

“While scaring people is incredibly fun, it’s not the whole point of our haunt,” Ferris says. “I want our haunt to be fun for everyone. I try and design the haunt so that anyone, even really small kids, can go through.”

Kim says, “The first couple of years, we managed the scare levels, but to be honest, we just scare at 100 percent now. It’s not the kids that are scared, but the moms.”

Lopez jokes, “It takes thought how to scare people in the direction you need them to run.”

By Shawn Price