A Homemade Fright of Fancy
Jay Shapiro has a routine day job making aircraft clamping devices. But come nightfall, his Vincent Price persona takes over.
Shapiro, a mechanical engineer, has spent his spare hours transforming his three-bedroom Sylmar home into a haunted Halloween house. A witch hiding in a frontyard tree glides by to greet visitors. Ring the doorbell and an ax swings down.
Inside, furniture trembles and drawers open suddenly. Shapiro sleeps in the “Poltergeist Room,” where a wax hand clutching a knife hangs from the ceiling.
Shapiro’s haunted house will open to visitors tonight through Halloween. Profits from the $5 admission will go to the Van Nuys-based nonprofit group Children of the Night, which helps teenage prostitutes get off the street. Last year, about 200 people visited the haunted house and about $300 was donated to the group.
Shapiro, whose teenage sons are at college, lives alone. For years he decorated his home for Halloween parties before deciding to open it to visitors.
“It gives me a chance to show off,” said Shapiro, 45.
He does not employ any high-tech special effects. Instead, Shapiro creates his devices with strings, pulleys, fishing line, air pumps and the help of volunteers.
“My first thought was people would think this is hokey,” said Katie Amstutz, 32, a Westchester actress and last year’s tour host. “But he does a great job and really pulls it off.”
Earlier this week, Shapiro walked three young neighbors through his house as a strobe light inside a small skull flickered through the hallway.
He led them to the “Exorcist Room.”
“We usually don’t go in here anymore,” Shapiro said as he grasped the doorknob. “But we have to force ourselves.”
Shapiro opened the door, revealing a girl made of chicken wire and foam, wearing a wig and sitting on a bed. Shapiro hit a switch and a machine began spewing smoke across the floor. The girl’s head started spinning and the bed levitated.
Later, Shapiro said he was disappointed at the reaction of the youngsters. “You’re supposed to be scared,” he told them.
“Oh, it’s not dark [yet],” said Danielle Babarinde, 14.
Although scaring jaded teenagers can be challenging, Shapiro takes pride in spending only about $400 to create his own props. He buys little motors in thrift shops and makes decor by hand, such as a giant plaster spider that climbs a living room wall.
“I try to be as original as I can,” he said. “I don’t like gory stuff. I don’t want [visitors] to be scared out of their wits. If a kid is crying and scared, that’s not the point of the thing.”
Although there are larger, commercial haunted houses, Shapiro’s home attracts crowds because many people like its old-fashioned nature, said Tree Washburne, a Reseda playwright and actress who volunteers at the house.
“We have enough glitz and fancy stuff,” said Washburne, 38. “As a kid, it would’ve inspired me to say, ‘Maybe this is something I could do.’ ”
Although he has spent most of his life working in the aerospace industry, Shapiro dreams of being a Hollywood special effects man.
“I don’t know any of my fellow engineers who do this kind of thing,” he said.
Shapiro’s haunted house at 14009 Candlewood Drive is open nightly from 5:30-9 p.m.
