‘I know that we’re being responsible’
Hammond’s Reaper’s Realm sits out second Halloween season due to COVID-19
As kids traipse from house-tohouse hoping for full-sized candy bars and adults gather at parties preening in their cleverest spooky attire on Halloween, the only nightmares John Hluska will have are the ones that will inspire the ghouls and goblins of his October next year.
Hluska, the proprietor of perhaps the largest of Northwest Indiana’s largest haunted attractions, Reaper’s Realm, is wellaware that other haunted houses around the area are and have been open for business, and he wishes them the best of luck. But he and his family weren’t ready to court the world’s worst nightmare — COVID-19 — and canceled Reaper’s Realm, which is visible along the Borman Expressway at Calumet Avenue in Hammond, for the second year in a row.
There were those people he talked to who didn’t understand why they would, especially because horror junkies are ready to have their pants scared off, Hluska, of Munster, said.
Lake and Porter counties saw a slight dip in cases over the last week, according to the Indiana Department of Health. Both counties were listed as “yellow,” and Lake County saw its positivity rate drop to 7% for the week of Oct. 25 while Porter County’s dropped to 6.5%. Meanwhile, 231,678 people are now vaccinated against the virus in Lake County and 90,629 are in Porter County.
Statewide, more than 1 million Hoosiers have tested positive for COVID-19 and more than 16,000 have died. Nearly 1,200 of those deaths have come from Lake County.
“People asked why we did it, and when I said COVID, they waved their hands (dismissively),” Hluska, 71, said. “It’s disappointing and it was a difficult decision, but I know that we’re being responsible.”
It’s not that he, his brother and sister, who are partners in the business, didn’t try to think of ways to do something, he said. The
Haunted Woods behind the mansion could’ve worked as well as the carnival out front because they’re outside, and they did consider it.
But putting on those events, even without the people freaking out the visitors in the three-story mansion, the former Indiana Botanic Gardens, takes a huge effort to complete and do well.
“With everybody here, there are at least 230 people who make Reaper’s Realm work,” Hluska said. “You have police, security and paramedics, which is 30 to 40 people right there. Then you have the actors, and they must have their makeup done, so we have seven or eight makeup artists.
There’s general staff — ticket takers, parking people — and we also have special effects people as well as four or five repair people who fix things that go wrong on-the-spot because no one wants to wait an hour for someone to arrive. There’s also just a lot of people working closely together, plus there’s a lot of yelling and screaming by everyone.
“With COVID and the delta variant being very strong, we couldn’t guarantee that someone wouldn’t get sick, and if someone did or, God forbid, died, that would be devastating.”
There’s no way to estimate how much money the Hluskas have lost by sitting out for two years — they could’ve opened last year, too, he said, but again chose not to — because the weather always plays a part.
If it’s raining, visitors will come out, but not as many, and if it snows, that’s worse because then staff has to dig out paths in the forest.
Money’s not the object, though. And with their notoriety, Hluska, a former Munster police officer and member of the Town Council, said he doesn’t foresee people forgetting that they’re the biggest game around.
“I’ll give people directions, and I’ll ask if they know where it is. Nine times out of 10, they do,” Hluska said. “Realm has become an institution, so when we come back — and we are coming back as soon as it’s safe — we’ll be as strong as ever.”