SAN FERNANDO : Skeletons Out for Halloween Haunted House

Seven years ago, Tom Santelmann put a few decorations on his front porch--spiders, pillow-case ghosts, “all the basic, simple stuff” for Halloween. The trick or treaters went wild.

“Come back next year and I’ll have something really special for you,” he told them.

Every year he did more--added another skull, a wall, a cemetery.

Now the back yard of his San Fernando home is a morbid mix of coffins, skulls; ax-wielding, Harley-Davidson-straddling skeletons and levitating ghosts.

Last year, more than 2,000 people came to his house for Halloween. The city had to close his block of Harding Street to accommodate the masses of masked youngsters.

“The kids love this guy,” Santelmann said, pulling a black plastic covering from a hulking, stuffed monster sporting a bloody skull and hockey mask. “The kids are petrified.”

The 42-year-old machinist for Magic Mountain and friends and neighbors have worked since August on the eerie effects.

“It’s the latest we ever started because I said I wasn’t going to do it anymore,” he said. “But the kids started knocking on the door asking . . . .”

He also had two persistent voices at home--daughters, Serene, 10, and Shannell, 9--urging him on as well. “They’re the big reason I do this,” he said.

Another reason is to promote an anti-drug message. The haunted house is peppered with Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E) bumper stickers.

Youngsters who come to the house will also be given anti-drug bracelets, buttons--whatever Santelmann can get his hands on.

“It’s to help keep them in line,” he said. “To tell them ‘don’t drink, don’t do drugs.’ You could end up a skeleton, you could end up in the electric chair.”

Or in a 10-foot-high, 20-foot-wide mausoleum like the one in Santelmann’s back yard.

“You’re sick,” a laughing San Fernando City Councilman Raymond Ojeda told Santelmann Friday when he looked around the yard.

“He does a great job. He just started recruiting friends and neighbors,” said Ojeda, who will serve popcorn and cotton candy from 6 to 10 p.m. on Halloween.

Santelmann also recruited support from 15 San Fernando businesses.

But when all the kids have left with their bags of candy, it is Santelmann left with the props, the skulls, the gravestones to store away for next year.

“You talk about skeletons in the closet?” he said. “ I have skeletons in my closet.”