New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Hamden resident’s annual display a true Halloween haunt
HAMDEN — Two skeleton riders are perched on the pillars of the cemetery gate.
From atop their skeletal steeds, they gaze ominously at Whitney Avenue’s many passersby, guarding the entrance to a yard filled with row after row of gravestones.
Each stone has its own design, and many bear names that might be familiar — their creators asked real, live neighborhood residents whether they were willing to play dead this Halloween season.
Skeletons, possibly the undead Hamdenites, fly through the air above the graveyard.
A stone walkway cuts through the scene.
At the end of it sits a dark blue house, more skeletons crawling from its second-story window.
The eerie display is what homeowner Eric Andrewsen calls the “Spring Glen Cemetery.”
And as he puts it, “there’s nothing cute about this place.”
Each year, in honor of
America’s spookiest holiday, Andrewsen designs and constructs an elaborate front-yard display with the help of his partner, Alfred Lee, and friend, Tyler Shamaly.
Andrewsen stocks up on candy and hires actors to haunt his home on Oct. 31, when the house’s doors open as wide as the cemetery gates, and visitors may enter if they dare.
“It’s an awesome thing that Eric does,” Shamaly said. “Him and Alfred really put together great, great things for the community, and I think it’s really admirable.”
Located near the intersection of Whitney Avenue and Wakefield Street, the home draws between 600 and 800 trickor-treaters each year, according to Andrewsen.
Though he never has charged entry, visitors this year will be able to make donations, all of which will go to the nonprofit organization Big Brothers Big Sisters, he said.
This holiday marks Andrewsen’s sixth year putting on a haunt, he said. The tradition was inspired by a house he visited one Halloween night as a child.
“I have never forgotten the house ... Halloween, that experience. All the other ones to me are a blur,” Andrewsen said. “I know that people coming through here, adults and children, will walk away with a memory.”
Andrewsen puts on his own annual Halloween experience for “the joy it brings others,” he said.
“It’s not about me, it’s about you,” he said.
Each year has its own theme. In 2020, the “year of the pumpkin,” Andrewsen hired a farmer to provide more than 4,000 stalks of corn, which he used to make a maze, he said.
He begins work on the designs every February of the year before. In other words, this year, “everything that you see out there was designed in 2020,” he said.
Lee, his partner, did the lettering on the gravestones, according to Andrewsen. A blowtorch was used to age the stones, each of which took four days to complete, he said.
They all bear the same date of death: Oct. 31, 2021.
What exactly might visitors expect to find at the cemetery that night?
They’ll have to stop by to find out, as Andrewsen would not give away any of his secrets.
“That’s part of the surprise, the haunt,” he said.