‘Haunted House’ Never Had a Ghost of a Chance : Halloween: Condemned by a fire inspector, Canyon High’s project is being ripped apart. It lacked sprinklers, smoke alarms and permits.

A character named Pinhead, from the 1987 horror movie “Hellraisers,” sticks dozens of pencil-length pins into his skull--and likes it. A chainsaw-wielding damsel delights in slicing off her own arms. Screams blast over loudspeakers from the soundtrack of the movie “Psycho.”

So it would have been in Canyon High School’s “haunted house” in Canyon Country, a Halloween Week project built by stagecraft and drama students and alumni with $2,000 they collected on their own. It was to include a maze, a dungeon and other rooms that could accommodate 49 thrill seekers at a time.

But this horror story has an unhappy ending even before it begins. The trouble was, the “haunted house” spooked the wrong person: a Los Angeles County fire inspector.

When he discovered the two-level, 2,300-square-foot house while routinely making rounds this week, inspector Charles Cooper ruled that the show must not go on.

Using scrap lumber and other materials from MGM and other studios, students had been working since August on the house, which was to be the star of a fund-raiser for the school’s drama department Oct. 28-31.

The house--constructed inside a campus multipurpose building of plywood, plaster board and canvas--had no sprinklers, smoke alarms or fireproof materials, Cooper noted. Worse yet, it had no building permit.

Without all four, he said, the house was hazardous.

No permit, no house.

“We couldn’t believe it,” James Schumacher Jr., 17, said. Schumacher, a senior and the show’s producer, and a dozen other students and youthful alumni disconsolately began dismantling their handiwork Friday.

“We had only one more week to go before we would be finished,” said Schumacher, who wore a “Grateful Dead” T-shirt. He said he is writing about the project for his senior thesis, which he hopes will help him gain admission next year to CalArts in Valencia.

“It’s depressing,” junior Alicia Shanahan, 16, said. “We were all looking forward to this. I’m planning to go into makeup work as a career. This would have been a lot more fun than doing regular makeup for our stage plays.”

Teacher Marilyn Pilkey and her students frantically tried all week to raise their “haunted house” from the dead. A less elaborate house built by most of the same students had passed inspection last year, and it raised $1,500 from admission fees.

But, as Pilkey recalled, a different inspector visited the campus, and “we weren’t nearly as far along in construction.”

Could the city of Santa Clarita come to the rescue?

No, Pilkey said. The city suggested that she call the state of California, which oversees school districts. A call to the office of the state architect, she said, put her in touch with an engineer who was sympathetic but said he could not overrule the fire inspector.

“I suggested to her that they have fire extinguishers ready and ask the Fire Department to place a couple of firefighters backstage,” said the engineer, who declined to be identified by name.

“I’m an opera buff, and I remember when ‘La Gioconda’ played in San Francisco a few years ago. One scene called for a burning ship on stage. A lot of firemen were there, just in case.”

Inspector Cooper had the day off Friday and could not be reached, but a colleague, Capt. Charles Seder of the county’s Fire Prevention Bureau in Sylmar, conceded that his department’s ruling was accompanied by mixed emotions.

“We feel like the bad guys,” Seder said. “But you’ve got to look at the good side. The object of that maze was to trap people in the house. If someone had died or been badly disfigured in a fire, none of us could have lived with ourselves.”

As the students and alumni resumed tearing down the house, a task they expect will take two weeks, Principal Mike Allmandinger arrived and said: “We’re not enemies of the Fire Department.”

What lessons have been learned from the students’ real-life horror story?

“Permits! Codes!” Schumacher said. “From now on, we know we’ve got to have them.”

With crowbars, hammers and other tools, Schumacher and his companions toiled into the night Friday, undoing what they had worked so hard to create.

It hurt. Sort of like sticking pins in their heads and slicing off their arms.