Halloween fanatics go all out for elaborate displays

LINDON, Utah County — One weekend last spring, Greg Shoop and a crowd of friends and acquaintances gathered in an oversized garage to talk about the upcoming holiday — not Independence Day or Labor Day, but Halloween.

The group hadn’t finished planting their gardens and school hadn’t yet let out for summer break, yet they were counting the days to Oct. 31 — 144 days, to be exact.

This is the world of haunters: Halloween fanatics who decorate their yards with “killer” displays. Think Christmas lights, projection and animatronic technology with the undead.

Every year, this Utah group, the Rocky Mountain Haunters, gathers to share tips and tricks for making props for their displays.

Shoop was leading a session on building a “haunted shovel" — a skeleton and a shovel animated with a windshield wiper motor. Most moving props, according to Shoop, are powered by wiper motors and the motors inside Christmas display reindeer. When neighbors throw away old reindeer, haunters, he said, take the motors.

The obsession seems to start as an innocent interest.

For instance, Denice Smith broke her ankle 18 years ago and needed something to do.

“They told me my cast would come off in October, so I started Googling stuff on making things and I found this group, and so I joined,” Smith said. Now, every October “Spooksville” appears in her front yard in Payson.

“Yeah, I work on Halloween all the time,” she said. “I take November and December off.”

Roger Hayes said his wife asked him to build a coffin for a church trunk-or-treat. That evolved into a 6,000-square-foot haunt under tents at his home, then in Georgia.

“We had a home haunt on steroids,” he said.

“Just call me Oz,” said Harold Weir. “Yeah, I’m the man behind the curtain, that’s me.”

For years, Weir was the man behind The Stringtown Nightmare Express, a haunted kids’ train with a large cast of extras. The life of the haunter, he said, becomes a series of DIY projects.

“(You) have to lay out every week. This is what I’m working on. These are my props,” he said. “You have to do that or you’ll never get done.”

“In fact, if you’re not building props, you’re figuring out what you can do to build a prop.”

“Halloween is not a holiday, it’s a lifestyle,” Shoop said.

Shoop’s home haunt began not as a way to scare children, but as a way to cheer them up. His sister-in-law was diagnosed with a brain tumor and had surgery on Halloween 22 years ago She was never the same after that and died eight months later, Shoop said. Her oldest daughter, Amy Hernandez, was left to raise her three siblings.

The following Halloween, Shoop and his wife, Cindy, threw a small party for the children.

“They needed the distraction because (the) last Halloween was so bad for them,” he said.

“We were all in a dark place and just trying to figure out life, and they were able to bring joy back into it,” Hernandez said.

One small gathering has since become three large parties. A few outdoor decorations is now a front-yard graveyard, a small army of skeletons, a skeleton horse and rider, a pumpkin man, a three-headed dog, a ghost and eyeball lights — all synced to a musical soundtrack. All that, not to mention the pumpkins, animatronics, haunted miniatures, zombie babies and more indoors.

The annual gathering of Cindy Shoop’s family, including Amy Hernandez and her siblings, has since become a family tradition, a de facto family reunion and an opportunity to reminisce about Hernandez’s mom.

She would have loved the celebration, Hernandez said, adding that her mom "was very much a party person."

“Halloween’s supposed to be fun. Halloween is supposed to be adventurous. It’s not supposed to be dark," Hernandez said. "It brought a lot of light into our family.”

Every year, the Rocky Mountain Haunters map out their members’ haunts. You can find the link by clicking here.

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