• Intro

The Terry Haunt

Address:

Anaheim, a few blocks southwest of Disneyland. No address yet, check the website the final weekend of October.
Anaheim, CA
United States

Tickets:

FREE

Phone:

714-318-0125

Website:

http://www.terryhaunt.com

About:

The family that Haunts together, ah... has a lot of fun together. They've been converting their garage since 1997 creating a great neighborhood block party. No fee. Refreshments are available on a first come, first served basis. As always, eyeballs are steamed, not fried. This year - "Klowns -- Do you dare?"

History:

Well, it all started quite innocently... Around and about the 1st of October, 1997, (our family's first official Halloween in our little house in Anaheim, California), my wife Yvonne and I watched a local news broadcast warning parents about Halloween... trying now to remember back... it seems there was a threat of some kind, a letter that had been written to the news station promising tainted candy and mayhem of some sort. We decided not to take the kids out Trick or Treating that year. We called them all together, Teresa 8, Julie 6 and Stephanie 4 and explained to them that they wouldn't be going out for the holiday but we were going to throw them instead a huge party, and invite all of their friends, and play games and have lots of food and ....... And their faces dropped to the floor. There were tears.Thinking quickly I said, OK, I'll make you a deal....I'll even build you a Haunted House in the garage, and we can have fun scaring your friends too! That got a different reaction. Smiles. The girls got excited, and we all started making plans of how best to scare their friends.....Little did I know what I had done at the time....I went to work. I was sort of expecting a peeled graves bowl of eyeballs, a bowl of spaghetti brains....that kind of thing. That only got me raised eyebrows and tapping feet from the kids. My girls, even at that age, told me I'd have to do better than that. Back to the drawing board. I went out and picked up a few rolls of black tarp material, a fog machine, a couple of black lights, a spooky tape, a couple of masks, and went to work...and work....and work.... I became sort of obsessed with the project, the more I did the more involved it got....The end product, although pretty tame by our standards these days, was pretty doggone impressive. We had about 40 people show up and party with us that night. The kids, their parents, neighbors, everyone came to see what was making so much noise on our sleepy little block. The kids had a blase, the parents stayed and imbibed with us, and it became sort of a block party atmosphere! That was the beginning of a very long tradtion!