Crypt a Real Trip to the Light Side of the Dark Side

As you move down Portsmouth Drive in Huntington Beach, you see the sort of middle-class houses you’d expect.

Until you reach No. 9422.

Sitting across the driveway, extending from the garage door to the sidewalk, is, according to the plaque on its facade, “The Haunted Crypt, est. 1982.”

Atop its makeshift plywood walls sit Styrofoam gargoyles, which overlook a door painted to suggest a Gothic portal.

The sign tacked beside the door announces that on Halloween and the night before, all “dead or alive are welcome.” A second sign warns that what waits inside “ will scare you.”

It is more of a promise than a warning, for it will cost 50 cents to enter the darkened maze inside and encounter whatever startling things 22-year-old George Anderson has planned.

Anderson is advertising his homemade fun house with leaflets hung on doorknobs around the neighborhood. The admission fee is “a donation to defray the cost of materials,” he said.

This year, he said, he spent about $500 constructing his front-yard Halloween prank. In past years, the effort has been more modest, starting when he was 10 and first put on a mask to scare trick-or-treating kids at the door. Since then, merely touring neighborhoods to collect candy seemed bland, he said.

While elaborate Halloween displays are not uncommon in Orange County neighborhoods, Anderson’s effort is unusually elaborate. He said that since June he has spent his waking hours on only two tasks--his job and his Haunted Crypt. “It’s bigger than ever,” he said.

If it sounds a bit theatrical, well, Anderson is theatrical. When he was high-school age he practiced magic and puppetry and did much of the set design and backstage work for Huntington Beach High School’s theatrical productions, he said. His uncle, who worked as producer of animated features and television shows, inspired him to study animation while attending Orange Coast College.

“Animation is what I really want to do, but there’s not much animation nowadays,” he said. At present, he does ornamental painting for an interior decoration firm.

He said most of the pleasure of the Haunted Crypt comes in the imagining, planning and building. On Halloween night, he and perhaps 10 friends will be operating the surprises inside, but that part “is boring” for him. Mostly it’s waiting for people to come inside and knowing that it all must be disassembled the next morning, he said.

But, he said, it really is scary for the kids who come inside. The best targets are the junior-high age kids, he said. “They’re old enough to come in without Mommy and young enough to scare.”

Anderson confesses to being a horror movie aficionado, but only of the old school--”’The Mummy,’ ‘Dracula,’ that gang.” So his fun house is based on the classic elements of horror: ghouls, eerie noises, dark corridors, uncertainty of what waits around the corner, startling movements where they’re least expected.

The Haunted Crypt does not have the slick sophistication of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion; the crypt is strictly homemade fare, Anderson said.

“I like to do it for the kids in the neighborhood, especially since we have a boring neighborhood.”

Times staff writer Caroline Langie contributed to this article.