It’s Back! : Canyon High School’s Haunted House Rebuilt, Ending Fire Inspector’s Nightmare

No, it’s not a Halloween prank, nor are students at Canyon High School in Canyon Country seeing ghosts.

Their beloved campus “haunted house”--which only three weeks ago spooked a fire inspector so badly that he ordered it torn down--has come back from the dead, just in time for Halloween.

“We were so upset about having to tear it down that we tried to think of a way to get back the $2,000 we all had in it,” James Schumacher Jr., 17, a senior and the horror show’s producer, said Friday,

Faster than you can say “poltergeist,” teacher Marilyn Pilkey’s drama and stagecraft students vowed to rebuild the house so it would meet fire codes, laboring at night to get rid of the maze that Los Angeles County Fire Inspector Charles Cooper had cited as potentially life-threatening if visitors became trapped inside.

They also enlarged the house from 2,700 to 3,600 square feet inside an all-purpose building on the campus--leaving wider spaces between the four major staging areas: a dungeon, a “radiation lab” with a mad scientist portrayed by a student, a meat locker where villains wielding chains tear off body parts from dummy victims, and a graveyard where corpses spring back to life.

And this time they built the house so safely that it’s . . . well . . . scary what a job they did.

“I’m really glad they stuck with it--they really have my admiration,” Pilkey said of her students. “These kids built it twice--with their own money.”

The only problem is that the haunted house has been sparsely attended. “Everybody thinks we’re shut down,” said James, adding that the house reopened Wednesday and will open again at 10 a.m. today for 12 hours, with admission proceeds going to a drama scholarship fund.

The key victory came Monday, Pilkey said, when inspector Cooper returned to inspect her students’ handiwork. This time, he pronounced the house fit to be toured.

Just like that, James, his sister, Brande, and their schoolmates, including Sandy Rodriguez, Alicia Shanahan, C.J. Kruska, Tom Phillips and Gary Harmon, revved up the special effects. They set off the simulated explosions. They cranked up the machines that spew dry ice to look like fog. And they screamed their scariest screams so loudly that when their voices wore out, other students had to be summoned as backup screamers.

Even James’ father, a printing press operator, and mother Brenda pitched in to help with props and ticket sales.

Conspicuously absent, however, was a fellow named Pinhead, from the 1987 horror movie “Hellraiser,” who delights in sticking pins into his own head and who was to be a star of the first haunted house.

This time, Pinhead’s costume wasn’t completed for the reopening, Pilkey said.

So Pinhead was left for dead. But given the way things pop back to life there lately, who knows?