Children’s Museum Gives Kids a Taste of the Scary

For children of all ages, Halloween conjures up visions of flying bats, screeching cats, cackling witches and creepy things that go bump in the night.

Sharing the excitement and fun of the dress-up tradition without scaring the dickens out of younger children is becoming something of a tradition at the Children’s Museum of San Diego in La Jolla.

This weekend, with the help of more than 200 volunteers, the museum will be transformed into Arachnoweb, Dr. Frankenstein’s Laboratory, Davy Jones’ Locker, and other mystery rooms, Assistant Director Carol Sigelman said.

“We’re looking at providing young children with an event that doesn’t scare the dickens out of them,” Sigelman said. “We’ve tried to come up with a program that’s just a little bit scary without leaving a lasting mark on them.”

This year will be the third time the museum has staged a Halloween party for 2 to 10 year olds in its romp rooms at the La Jolla Village Square Shopping Center in La Jolla. The last Halloween event, in 1988, drew more than 1,000 youngsters to the museum, which has operated out of donated space in the mall since 1981.

From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday, children can explore the 7,000-square-foot Mystery Museum with their parents without hearing the words “no” or “don’t touch,” Sigelman said. “We say yes to kids.”

Dr. Frankenstein’s Lab will come equipped with microscopes to look at slides of blood and bug wings, and touchy-feeley boxes for children to put their hand inside and guess what’s in them. The contents of the boxes are top secret but it “won’t be like putting your hand into raw liver,” she said. The lab, complete with a skeleton and models of the human body, doubles as a health room the rest of the year.

Davy Jones’ Locker will feature a quiet, crawl space for toddlers. Strands of shimmering Milar will be strung from the ceiling to look like seaweed, and the hollow, blue tubes on the floor will be for crawling through. “It’s designed to be like an undersea adventure for toddlers,” Sigelman said.

Kids visiting Arachnoweb, dubbed for the movie Arachnophobia, will be able to weave a fantasy web out of white wool. Each child will add to the web by pulling and stretching the wool. “It’ll end up looking like a giant cobweb,” Sigelman said. “It kind of takes on a life of its own.”

Little ghosts and goblins who want to show off their Halloween costumes will be able to stage impromptu performances with the museum’s bug, bat and spider puppets on a child-sized stage. Children will take the stage to parade across in pink high heels, lavish evening dresses cast off by grown-ups, cowboy boots, sports outfits and a firefighter’s suit, Sigelman said. “Little girls like the cowboy boots and firefighter’s suit as much as the boys,” she said.

The high-tech set can take their bows on the closed-circuit television set of Dracula’s News. Draped in black capes, kids will sit on Dracula’s throne--the news anchor desk during the week--and watch themselves deliver the latest ghoulish reports.

Budding young authors will be able to try their hand at ghost writing with invisible ink, Sigelman said.

For children who want to make their own mystery masks, the museum will hand out face masks for kids to decorate to their hearts’ content with an assortment of foil, glitter, confetti, lace, fancy papers, feathers and sequins.

For pint-sized pumpkins and ballerinas who can sit still long enough, sorority sisters from Kappa Kappa Gamma at UC San Diego will work their magic doing face painting, Sigelman said.

On Saturday, story tellers will regale youngsters with scary Halloween tales at the beginning of every hour and at noon and 1 p.m. on Sunday. The performers are sponsored by The Greater San Diego Reading Assn. which has also compiled a list of Halloween stories appropriate for young children, Sigelman said.

The party’s headline performers include Sandy the Mime, performing at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday; folk singer Sam Hinton, well known to public school children, will take the stage with his guitar at 2 and 3 p.m. on Sunday; San Diego Instant Opera singer Kelli Evans-O’Connor will acquaint children with opera traditions at 3:30 p.m. Sunday.

“Everything comes free with the $2.75 price of daily admission except for the Ghostly Goodies on sale in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Room,” Sigelman said.

The price of admission has been waived for 125 disadvantaged children and their families to attend the party, Sigelman said. They include families from the St. Vincent De Paul Joan Kroc Center, Alpha Kappa Alpha Head Start program in Santee and Bayside Settlement House, an after-school, day-care project in Linda Vista.

The museum will be closed on Halloween night on Oct. 31, but the gift shop will remain open for the mall’s traditional trick-or-treat night to hand out candy and two-for-one passes to the museum, Sigelman said. Helping young children get the most out of the Halloween experience in a safe environment is the goal of the museum and the merchants, she said.