Could Hyde Park Avenue be Hamilton’s scariest Trick-or-Treat Street. Our Jeff Mahoney checks it out with Mother Halloween.
Plus, the McKenzies are scaring the smiles onto the faces in a Mount Hope neighbourhood
On this special day we bring you two stories, the first looking at the end of a chapter in one great tradition, and the second looking at the early growth of what is shaping up to be another.
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You’ve heard of Father Christmas. Well, Ruthy Newton is Mother Halloween, at least on Hyde Park Avenue, with its special atmosphere of Grand Guignol-meets-Mardi Gras every Oct.
31. It is, arguably, Hamilton’s premier Trick-or-Treat Street.
Costumed children, usually with parents in tow, flood the sidewalks; cars do not even attempt to turn onto the road; numerous houses are tricked out in elaborate theme works and Halloween special effects.
Spooky music is piped from trees and beneath stairs. Scary images are projected onto houses. Some houses, it’s reputed (wink, wink), hand out wine to parents, speakeasy-style. Even the dogs dress up.
“Last year was our record,” says Ruthy, who got it all started on Hyde Park some 50 years ago. In 2018, she had 512 kids visit her house, which is at the centre of the street’s excitement and features projections, huge inflatables (dragon and its babies), straw people, rows of lunch bags with tea lights, and more.
It is the most amazing thing. She’s had several 500-plus years. Most houses along the street get at least 300 kids on Halloween. Residents practically need silos to store all the candy they’ll hand out. Ruthy herself lays in boxes and boxes full of Pringles potato chip packages.
But this year, her friend Denise Konig tells me, will likely be her last as Halloween queen. And Ruthy confirms it.
“It’s time for the younger generation,” she says. She’s thinking of moving to a smaller residence.
Ruthy was new to Hyde Park, pregnant with her first child and looking out the window one day in 1968, as Halloween was approaching. And if you’d seen her through the glass, you might’ve thought it was raining but that was just her tears.
“I was crying,” she tells me, because there were so few young couples and kids on the street. It was an aging neighbourhood and she was anxious: Who would play with her child? She was also reminiscing about Halloweens along the “country” road where she’d herself grown up — near Pottruff between Queenston and Nash. Country? Well, back then it was.
On her small rural street, there had been a spirited showing at Halloween, and Ruthy’s always been good at crafts. So that first year on Hyde Park she applied herself to making the day as special as she could. It was a kind of prayer to the future. And it worked.
“Within a year and a half or two, the street had rejuvenated,” she recalls. Young couples moved in. In time, it was teeming with kids.
Ruthy has kept the Halloween effort up all those years, every year, expanding on it, and as she did, the whole street gradually caught the fire and fell in behind her. Ruthy and her late-husband Bill’s two kids, and their friends in the neighbourhood, absolutely loved the Halloween energy and over the years they really started stoking it up.
“It was wild growing up in this huge tradition,” says Kelly Kimpton, Ruthy’s daughter. She comes home with her own kids at Halloween and spends it with her mom, helping, in costume, to hand out candies, as she’s done since she aged out of trick-ortreating as a teen.
Ruthy’s house is always abuzz at Halloween. Neighbours like Denise Konig come and help out. The weekend before she throws a party, for family, with a Halloween-themed table and decorations all over the interior, including a Halloween tree with branch ornaments.
So tonight will be a very special one at Ruthy’s. But she has to know she’s passing her torch to some very capable hands. The neighbourhood has been very well-coached. By the best Halloween mentor they could possibly have. Ruthy Newton.
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Kevin and Sarah McKenzie’s tradition might not have quite the vintage of Ruthy’s, not yet, but are they ever off to a good start.
It’s been about four or five years since the young couple moved to Grassyplain Drive in Mount Hope and, in that time, they’ve got the neighbourhood, especially the kids, more curious each Halloween about just what the Mckenzies will pull off.
This Halloween is the most sensational of all, with Kevin having built a false wall that fits into the space of the garage-door opening. And on it is a kind of living window or screen from which it appears zombies are breaking through a wooden barrier and trying to spill into the neighbourhood. It is deliciously frightening and lifelike. In an upstairs window is the silhouette of a man raising his arms in terror.
They’ve also created an electric chair scene, with a skeleton clicking the switch, another one seated in the chair and a highvoltage box rigged up beside it. There are fierce dinosaur dog skeletons with huge fangs, mannequins and much more.
Everything is done to the hilt, with animation, sound and lighting. The two, Kevin and Sarah, combine their considerable talents. He has great construction skills — his job is rigging cranes in Toronto skyscraper projects and is helping build the highest apartment skyscraper (95 floors) in Canada. Sarah runs a writing business and a craft business, Sarabella Handcrafted Home Décor.
The inside of the house is equally impressive. Every wall and inch of space has some Halloween accent. They also throw a big Halloween party and it’s costume-mandatory; you literally don’t get in without one.
Kevin makes his own latex masking and cosmetic effects, including a zipper for his face that opens. On Halloween, he himself is part of the lawn frights. He’s also formulated an actual plan for surviving a zombie apocalypse.
But does that mean there’s a big letdown after the day? Hardly. “I immediately start thinking about next year,” says Kevin with a huge smile.