HALLOWEEN HAUNTINGS
Some Calgarians aren’t afraid of fun
Christine Campbell’s haunted house obsession started 28 years ago, when she was a toddler.
Her dad, Ian Campbell, was babysitting some neighbourhood children one day, but he also needed to rake the leaves.
He convinced the kids to rake and stuff the leaves into white garbage bags, to turn into “ghosts” for Halloween. They had so much fun that, the following year, they made tombstones from empty cereal boxes. Then skeletons out of toilet paper rolls.
Every year, as the kids got older, the spooky creations became more elaborate.
“As the neighbourhood kids grew, so did our imaginations,” Campbell says. “Every year, we were thinking, ‘ What else can we do?’”
Now Campbell, her partner Ryan Spickett and Campbell’s parents start months in advance, picking a theme and building props. It takes about 500 hours to assemble each haunted house, Campbell says, and volunteers come from every quadrant of the city. So do visitors; last year, between 5,000 and 7,000 people stopped by.
Campbell and her family attend at least one haunted house convention each year, to find ideas and props for the upcoming Halloween. This year’s theme is Hollywood Horror, so they’ve added a replica of the Bates Motel, made famous in the movie Psycho.
Also this year, Campbell’s oneyear-old son will be “help” for the first time. “A whole new generation is getting started,” Campbell says. “We call him the littlest haunter.”
Campbell and her family aren’t alone in their obsession. For the past 18 years, Campbell’s friend Chrissy Oliver and her husband Jason Oliver have been creating the Haunted Wastelands in Lake Chaparral. This year’s theme is Asylum; about 3,000 visitors will wind their way through a maze that includes dark hallways, a lobotomy room and a haunted chapel.
“We give out candy, too,” Chrissy says. “But last year, people were so scared. They were running out without taking any.”
A true sign, one might say, of success.