The Haunted House had a modest beginning in 2001 in Camelot Apartments with one person in a costume. We then moved to Sierra Sunset behind Cibola High School and progressed to a banquet table scene full of homemade mannequins with movie icons enjoying the dinner and I (Mark) pushed all the different animatronic gadgets with my finger or triggered them with a flashlight while patrons toured the “Ha
unted House” in 2002. At this point, the Haunted House was located in a small front yard. In 2003, a permanent maze was built in the garage, which lengthened the haunted house and gave us plenty of room to scare people. Unfortunately, this made it difficult to do laundry as one would have to exit the kitchen door and walk through a maze to get to the washer and dryer, which was quite comical. The Haunt grew over the next two years to cover most of the front yard, driveway, garage maze, and the roof utilizing 8-10 actors to provide scares. We then decided to move to a bigger and better location, because on Halloween night there were four blocks of parking tied up to get to the “Boogeyman Bungalo”. So, we ended up at our current residence on the corner of 4E and County 15½ which covers a little over 2½ acres. This new haunt was renamed Yuma Nightmares Haunted House. The current Haunted House takes up approximately 1 acre now. We will probably keep the actual size of the haunted house to 1 acre as it takes 50 actors a night to cover all the areas adequately. With the extra room we put up a 2,000 square foot tent-like structure which was a lot of fun, but we broke it down after two years in favor of a more code friendly open air environment. We have grown over 300 different plants in our desert lot to transform it into more of a park-like/cemetery-like environment which provides us with all kinds of fun shadows and creepy places to hide in. For the last five years, we also expanded to a Christmas event initially named “The Haunted Holiday” as we were trying to recreate what Disney was doing with their Haunted Mansion Holiday in the winter. I strongly recommend you visit their event which runs from September to early January. Our walk-through Christmas at the haunted house Has grown considerably And was renamed “T’was The Fright Before Christmas!” And has non -scary version in which you go through The re-themed haunted house with a candle which lets the actors know not to scare you just to entertain… We also have the scary version which you do not take a candle through, and then the actors Who are dressed up more in Christmas type characters or non-scary monster characters like the ones in nightmare before Christmas or monsters Inc.. We pull out the traditionally scary characters like Freddy Krueger, Mike Myers, keeper scrapers etc. and replace those with evil elves, snowman, gingerbread man, at the aforementioned Fun monster characters so that children under 12 or timid adults can go through and enjoy the haunted house. Re-run the Christmas at the haunted house every two years as it’s quite an undertaking to turn 1 acre of haunted house into Christmas in five weeks. We finally figured out how we could probably do it every year and planned on doing it every year and then the pandemic struck. This resulted And the need to think outside the box and so we came up with the Christmas Halloween mashup drive-through which was a hit right away. We expanded that experience the Next year (2021 ) Which was even more successful! Now our event utilizes 100 to 200 volunteers per event to fill the 50 positions per night needed to run an event this size. Our set design is improved upon each year and our costumes become more elaborate with each season. Again we are always looking for fun and energetic/motivated people become part of our core group of actors. Please come out and see what people are talking about!
