It is with great pleasure that we bring to you the second of our yard haunts covered last season, Grone’s House of Horror, voted HauntFreals.com “Best Yard Haunt,” for 2002.
We caught up with 34 year old Halloween enthusiast Bob Grone on Halloween night last year. Taking a few minutes out of his evening he told us that he had just started decorating his mother’s yard like this 2 years ago, but “It really all started when I was a kid, about 12 or 13. One of my friends up the street used to decorate his mother’s yard and basement and I would help him. After a few years, he stopped and I bought a lot of his stuff. Then my Uncle and I started decorating his yard, we did that for several years, then due to changes in the family, we stopped. I just decided 2 years ago that I was going to do it again. That was 2001, and turn out was poor, in the aftermath of 9/11, not too many people wanted to send their kids out Trick-or-Treating. Last year we saw a better turn out. Right now we carry the ‘haunt’ into the living room and the kids are invited in for candy, and now this year we’re planning on adding a corn-maze to the back yard.” With the help of friends and family, the yard is completed in about a week, but the plans begin a month or two in advance…
From the most basic styrofoam tombstone to his home-made props such as his puking man in the vat of sulfuric acid or the “casket that eerily creeps open” as one ventures up the path, no detail was spared. His most effective use of the lighting we have seen in a house haunt to date, complimented his use of fog machines, strategically placed in the yard and on the roof, completely enveloping the house in an eerie green fog…. Bob welcomes visitors, advertising his haunt with Day-Glo orange laminated posters strewn throughout the neighborhood and the pride he takes in his Halloween endeavor is justified…. It is truly the house that today’s neighborhood kids will remember and the legacy will live on when they tell their children about “this house that was in their neighborhood when they were a kid…”

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