Woodland Hills family invites public to their 12-year-old son’s haunted house, in the garage
You don’t see this too often, if ever, but a Woodland Hills family is celebrating Halloween weekend by inviting the public — in a story published in the Los Angeles Daily News several days ago — to stop by their home and face the homemade spooky haunted house set up in their garage.
And more than 100 neighbors, strangers and curious types responded on opening night, Friday Oct. 28 — serious maze-goers who lined up to get the wits scared out of them. The maze is open again Saturday night and Sunday night, Oct. 29th and 30th.
The crowd lined up Friday at 8 p.m. in anticipation of 12-year-old Elliott Arnold’s creation, the “Deadly Attempt Haunted House” filled with “dead” scary figures, creepy noises, weird mist, skulls and a mummified zombie that popped out of nowhere holding a bloody knife — and a head.
Elliott, a seventh-grader at Louis Armstrong Middle School in Sherman Oaks, transformed his family’s one-car garage into a three-room fright space after spending an exorbitant amount of time over the past year plotting the theme and design of what he eventually constructed, mostly by himself.
He figured out the lighting, the sound effects and all the intriguing elements that go into creating a haunted house that frightens the best of us.
Two large skulls mark the entry with flashing lights. And inside there are horrors like a life-size dead figure, a billboard with pictures of missing people and a harvester of souls dressed in a long black frock spewing loud, chilling sounds.
And Elliott’s sister Evelyn, 10, is a mummified zombie character who scares the guests as she appears from nowhere to slash a dead figure with a bloody knife. Beware.
For more information, visit https://www.arnoldhalloweenexperience.com.
Hours of operation on Saturday Oct. 29 are 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. to 10 p.m., and on Sunday Oct. 30 the hours are 8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Admission is free. The location is 20611 Tiara St., Woodland Hills. It is recommended that children under 10 years old be accompanied by a guardian.