Pssst. Hey, buddy, wanna buy a graveyard?
For the past eight years, Stacey and Sheila Goodman have turned their Qualicum Beach home into a Halloween haunt filled with ghouls, corpses and creepy creatures.
But they’ve never been as terrified as they are this year, with Halloween scheduled to arrive without their one-of-a-kind, custom graveyard and witches’ den.
“People said before we moved in, there used to be 15 or 20 kids coming by to trick or treat on Halloween,” Stacey said. “Last year we had between 400 and 500 people show up. A lot of people made it their final destination on Halloween and that’s my biggest fear — that they’ll come and there will be nothing there.”
The Goodmans have downsized and moved to a French Creek home unsuitable for erecting the sprawling Bone Alley, Dead End Cemetery and haunted house they hosted for a decade in North Vancouver and another eight years on Chester Road in Qualicum Beach. Now, they are faced with the dilemma of what to do with the estimated 700 hundred or so custom pieces of set decoration they have accumulated and created over the last two decades.
“I would love to have all this go to an organization that wants to do up Halloween and do it big,” Stacey said. “That would be ideal. Failing that, maybe we’ll just have a garage sale and spread it throughout the neighbourhood.”
These pieces are not the cackling, animatronic witches, chattering skulls and dangling plastic skeletons you purchase at the neighbourhood department store every autumn. Stacey Goodman, 67, worked as a special effects technician in the film industry until retiring recently, and teamed with his wife, who also works in the film industry as an accountant, to hand-craft the bulk of the holiday decorations.
His specialty is taking raw materials scavenged from movie set decoration sales, cast-off store mannequins or dress-maker’s forms, and combining them with modern motion- and voice-activated pieces to create unique creatures and accessories.
Among his finds are an actual coffin from a movie set, which has been sawed in half and filled with mouldering corpses to crawl from half-submerged gravesites in Dead End Cemetery, and the rigid foam form for a wolf from the movie The Grey, which he and Sheila converted into a menacing and bloody chupacabra, a mythical vampire beast that attacks livestock.
“Sheila’s the true Halloween buff,” said Stacey. “She designs a lot of the pieces and she helped build a lot of them. She’s very good with her hands.”
The couple has been together for 30 years, Stacey said, and began creating the haunted home 18 years ago in North Vancouver. The display grew each year, and continued after they relocated to Qualicum Beach in 2008.
“When we first started (in Qualicum Beach), I think some of our neighbours were a little mad about having to buy so much extra candy,” he said. “But by last year most of them seemed to love it. They were sad to see us leave.”
Their display was entered through a huge, lighted arch at the end of a gravel driveway at the side of the house, designating “Bone Alley.” From there, visitors strolled through Dead End Cemetery and its menagerie of decomposing denizens.
From there, a guest might walk past the chalk outline of a murder victim and an adjacent body bag — which suddenly sits up and moans — to the Goodmans’ Fun and Games Room. Each year the den was decorated in a different theme. Last year, a witch’s home sported a cauldron and a large table, crawling with rats and spiders and set with dinner plates overflowing with boiled brains.
Goodman said he began working in September on any pieces that required repair or maintenance, then began set-up in early October.
“It would take a month to put it together,” he said. “Then we’d take it all down that night. When people drove by the house the next day, there was nothing there.”
That is the permanent state at their former home, as Stacey has most of the pieces in a makeshift morgue at his new home. If a social service organization, municipality or fire department wants to host a high-quality Halloween haunted house, he is willing to negotiate its reanimation.
“We’re both disappointed we’re not going to be able to do it any more,” he said. “Hopefully somebody will be able to make use of this and keep it alive.”
To inquire, call Stacey or Sheila Goodman at 250-752-3200 or 1-604-868-4613.
