Spooky Hollows Home Haunt
Spooky Hollows Home Haunt
Hollywood Gothique Says:
Most years, Spooky Hollows is an impressive combination of yard display and walk-through maze, featuring unbelievably ambitious settings filled with amazing monsters – everything from a swamp with skeletal gators to a sewer tunnel haunted by god knows what. Though not as well known as some of the longer-lived Halloween Home Haunts, Spooky Hollows is awesome stuff!
16418 Gilmore Street
Van Nuys, CA 91406
facebook.com/SpookyHollows
2023 Update: This Halloween’s presentation is another sidewalk show (fx, music, narration) with a Ghostbusters theme.
Dates & Hours: October 20-22, 27-31, 7-10pm.
Admission: Free, but Spooky Hollows accepts donations of canned goods to go to local charities.
Spooky Hollows Home Haunt Articles
Discover more in the Spooky Hollows Archive:
Spooky Hollows Home Haunt History & Information
Loaded with decorations and props, The Spooky Hollows began haunting in 2011, offering a self-described a yard display suitable for all ages. Over the years, the yard haunt morphed through several themes (The Graveyard Emerges, The Spooky Hollows Grave Yard Sale, Legends of the Swamp), keeping its horrors fresh from season to season.
The walk through was added in 2016. The front yard was still decorated, with a display featuring such notable sights as a tomb emblazoned with the name Koritzke (a tribute to Bob Koritzke, who operated the Spooky House Halloween haunt for decades) and a clever pun based on The Walking Dead – a warning about some not so dangerous “walkers.”
The maze began inauspiciously with a path around the side of the house, but the back yard was filled with amazing settings, included a swamp, a sewer, and a greenhouse with some sinister fauna. A rickety bridge led over a pond with a snapping alligator; there were simulated underground tunnels housing all manner of strange things, including some weird sort of plant-human hybrid. Later years saw an even more amazing monster added, the Sewer Dweller seen above.
The home haunt switched from a walk-through to a yard display in 2019. With Covid-19 precluding close contact in tight spaces, Spooky Hollows did another front yard display in 2020, this time with an elaborate show using projections and lighting effects timed to a soundtrack explaining the origin of the haunt’s resident sewer dweller, Mr. Sticky.
At the time, proprietor John Cassella suggested that some of those elements would be incorporated into future versions of the haunt; however, things took a turn in a new direction in 2021, with an upbeat display based on Ghostbusters (1984).
Halloween 2022 saw another themed show, returning to the Mr. Sticky theme, this time titled The Cult of Mr. Sticky.
Spooky Hollows Home Haunt Photo Gallery
