A couple create a "funeral home" run by a creepy family at a relative's house in Pinellas Park.
By SHARON KENNEDY WYNNE
Published October 17, 2004
PINELLAS PARK - So you may think you get into Halloween with your eyeball lights from Target and your cobwebs around the door.
But do you have five fog machines, nine coffins, 30 tombstones and hundreds of body parts? Casey Paquet does.
Paquet, 27, the Web manager for Eckerd College, and his wife, Sommer, 22, a biochemistry student at Eckerd, are concocting a haunted house at her uncle's house in Pinellas Park that they hope will rival Busch Gardens in quality and attention to detail.
The Clearwater couple don't charge admission or get anything out of this other than bragging rights among the handful of "home haunters" on the Internet who swap tips and project plans. (Did you know, for example, that you can make a coffin out of a single sheet of plywood? Or that the engine from a Saturn windshield wiper does a great job of making a hanging corpse kick and flail?)
"I'm just obsessed," Paquet says with a grin. "It's a lot of work but also a lot of fun."
He grew up in California in the shadow of the movie studios, so he has always loved Halloween and the technical side of movie sets. He always threw killer Halloween parties, and continued to when he moved to Florida three years ago.
He has to rent a storage unit to contain all his Halloween props, worth upward of $10,000. He doesn't keep a running account of how much his Halloween kitsch has cost him, in part because he'd hate to have to confess how much he spends.
In 2001, they took over Sommer's parents' house in Port Richey and made an elaborate haunted yard. They expanded it to the garage the next year.
Then last year, Sommer's uncle Rick Brunk, 37, an air-conditioning and refrigeration technician, offered his house for decoration. They would have been happy with just his yard and front porch, Paquet said, but Brunk opened up the whole house.
They put together the haunt, enlisted friends to help as guides and chainsaw-wielding fright masters, and put fliers up around the neighborhood. About 200 people showed up.
This year, it's more elaborate and will be held on both Oct. 30 and 31.
They started working in August, although Paquet says he thinks about it all year, jotting down ideas in a special notebook.
This year not only does it have more props, but it has a "back story." It's the "Shallow Valley Funeral Home," and visitors will see not only the funeral home and morgue but the creepy family that lives there and operates the funeral home.
The front porch will get a new entryway using a salvaged antique door and a Shallow Valley entrance sign. On the porch will be a standing organ and chairs set up for a funeral service, with a corpse on display.
Enter the house and the music changes - there's a soundtrack for every room - and you are in the "employee" area where an old hag is working in the mortuary's makeup room, dolling up the corpses. In the family room actors and props portray a crazy grandmother and family, including a kid with a spinning head sitting in front of the TV.
Next is the morgue, where Brunk hopes to set up a refrigeration system to make it as chilly as a real lab. Out back is the cemetery with tombstones, a hanging corpse, and a shed that will be converted into a crematorium.
There are a lot more gags and frights along the way, but we won't ruin it for you.
If you go
The Shallow Valley Funeral Home haunted house will be open from 6:30 to 10 p.m. Oct. 30 and 31 at 7190 79th St. N in Pinellas Park. You can get directions and see some of the projects at www.shallowvalley.com
