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Homemade Haunted House | |||
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By Amy Bentley-Smith Halloween just wouldn’t be Halloween without a haunted house. While there are the highly-produced haunts at places like Knott’s “Scary” Farm, Magic Mountain’s Fright Fest, and, more locally, the Queen Mary’s Shipwreck, the homemade versions can be just as scary. Case in point: the house at 3431 Myrtle St. on the edge of California Heights that half-brothers Robert Burr, 35, and Phillip Schmidt, 26, transform every year into an elaborate labyrinth of terror. “People have said we’re better than Knott’s Scary Farm,” Schmidt said. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Schmidt and Burr have been creating their haunted house for the past 12 years. It’s a tradition that’s been going on in their family for a lot longer. It started with Schmidt’s dad. “I always remember it. He was probably doing it before I was born,” Schmidt said of his dad’s haunted houses. In big-brotherly fashion, Burr clarified, “I was about 5, so yeah, it was definitely before you were born.” When Schmidt and Burr were old enough, they helped the elder Schmidt on his haunted house. Burr was the first to branch out. His first haunted house on Myrtle — his father’s house — was just a room. He said he and a friend covered the room in felt, put neon spots all over and used a black light to highlight the spots. “He (Burr) would wear a piece of black felt too and you couldn’t see him,” Schmidt said of the simple, yet effective scare tactic. It remains a “room” in the current haunted house. A few years later, Burr got a little more elaborate. He had props this time and they were hooked up to a pulley system. However, Burr had to control all the pulleys. He said he would just stand in one spot all night pulling the strings. “I couldn’t leave that spot for four hours,” Burr said. Eventually Schmidt left his dad’s haunted house to help Burr expand on his. “My dad still caters to the average trick-or-treater from 1985 — 7 year olds,” Schmidt said as to why he left. “Now it’s (the average trick-or-treater) 14 years old. Ours is for the older kids.” “I wouldn’t want a 6-year-old stepping through our haunted house,” Burr admits. With Schmidt onboard, the haunted house went more high tech. “Now it’s all automated,” Schmidt said of props that are triggered by motion detectors and move with pulleys hooked to air compressors. It’s still very much a homemade production. The labyrinth-like corridors that snake through the back yard and garage are created with dozens and dozens of blue tarps. The brothers admit that it’s not scary in the daytime, but even without all the props in place and turned on, they don’t like to walk through it at night. The haunted house uses every trick in the haunted house book (except the ubiquitous white ghost) — vibrating and moving floors, monsters, creepy-crawly things, a maze, a graveyard, loud bangs, screams, fog, flashes of light and areas of pure darkness, and the unknown creeping around every corner. Schmidt said there are about 50 hiding places for the 15 or more people who will be helping to scare the “victims” who enter. Each year, Schmidt and Burr come up with something new to scare the crowds, which rise to the thousands. Last year, they estimate, close to 2,000 teens and adults went through the haunted house. The line to enter was five to six deep and stretched down the block. This year, they plan to set up televisions out front tuned to a live feed of footage inside the haunted house. “Those in line can watch others get scared,” Burr said. The brothers talk excitedly about all the bells and whistles of their haunted house. They admit they enjoy thinking of new ways to scare and entertain those who walk through each year. It makes it that much more fun for them, too. “The main reason we do it is for personal amusement,” Schmidt said. “We have a lot of fun setting it up and pulling it off.” It takes them about 30 working days to transform Burr’s dad’s yard into the haunted house. They start in late August and work every weekend. The week leading up to Halloween, they’re there every day. “I plan my vacations around this,” Burr said. They estimate they have spent more than $30,000 in the past 12 years on all the special effects, but they’ve never charged admission and don’t plan on it. “If we charged, it wouldn’t come anywhere close to covering what we spend, so why bother?” Schmidt said. They will accept donations, but even those they won’t keep, Burr said. “Any donations we get, we give to the neighbors,” Burr said, explaining that it’s the least they can do to repay all that his dad’s neighbors put up with, from opening their backyards up as staging areas or actor pass-throughs to all the trick-or-treaters that come because of the haunted house. But it’s in part due to the neighbors that they keep setting up the haunted house year after year. The neighborhood has come to expect it. “It just started out as a creative outlet,” Burr said. “Now we do it because honestly the neighbors won’t let us not do it.” Schmidt and Burr’s haunted house at 3431 Myrtle Ave. will be welcoming poor souls from 6:30 to 11 p.m. this Friday and Saturday and on Halloween.
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