AMERICUS
From the Dead Shed in the backyard to the Sinister Room in the basement, Kim Meyers has decorated her house on Sycamore Street to the hilt for Halloween.
“A lot of people like Christmas,” she said. “I do Halloween.”
Outside, she and her family have made spider webs, piles of pumpkins, hay bales, lights and other seasonal items in the front of the house. They’ve filled the backyard with tombstones, fenced in with wrought iron and realistic-looking stone pillars carved from foam and painted shades of gray. A sign warns: “Forsaken Cemetery. Exhumation in Progress.”
The Dead Shed, complete with a coffin, contains the props and equipment that won’t fit in the house.
Inside, every open space holds something with a Halloween or haunted house theme, from carved-out pumpkins to skull piles to heinous-looking oversized clown dolls. Shelves in the Sinister Room hold a haunted town, with the “Dead as a Doornail Morgue” as the centerpiece.
But the decorations aren’t confined just to the season.
Some of them will remain up year-’round, though Meyers will shuttle in new pieces occasionally as she finds them.
“Halloween’s not a holiday, it’s a lifestyle,” she said.
The decorations are not for public viewing, Meyers said, just for family and friends.
She has the greater passion for haunting, but her husband Jody and their children have become willing participants.
Meyers can’t remember when she wasn’t interested in scaring herself and others. She’s been decorating extravagantly for Halloween since she was a child.
“I remember Mom buying me latex and doing these wounds and stuff,” she said.
She credited, rather than blamed, her older siblings for her interest.
“I remember them making me watch scary movies, and I think that warped my brain,” she said, adding that she since has repaid them. “I’ve scared the bejeezies out of them.”
The Meyerses’ parents, Ray and Judy McClellan and Gene and Annalee Meyers, helped out as their adult children morphed into The Scream Team and took over running a haunted house for a number of years in Strong City at Halloween. The dads helped with the nuts-and-bolts labor, while the women primarily helped sew costumes and other accessories.
Judy McClellan and Kim Meyers each built a 3-foot by 4-foot Jack-in-the-box to add another layer of fright in the house.
“That was some great mother-daughter bonding, painting under the black light,” Meyers said, laughing.
The Meyerses staged the house to make viewers uneasy, taking them outside their comfort zones, which she said is a major component for a successful haunted house. Each room has a centerpiece that attracted the tourists’ attention.
It’s important to let the viewers’ imaginations take hold — and that is as true for Meyers as for anyone else touring a haunted house.
“I want to be startled like everybody else,” she said. “I want that adrenaline rush.”
The couple took their interest to the next level and began attending haunted house conventions across the country. Haunting, and all that it entails, has become a big business and a big hobby, too.
The conventions draw haunted house operators, film and television actors and makeup artists, industry representatives and others who enjoy fright, in one way or another. The Meyerses meet a lot of interesting, friendly, and non-judgmental people at the conventions, she said.
Among the better-known participants are Michael Bailey Smith, who starred in “The Hills Have Eyes,” actor Irwin Keyes and Chad Savage, perhaps one of the best-known genre artists in the business. Meyers has several of his richly colored “dark” paintings hanging in the Sinister Room.
Meyers said the conventions are good sources of information and instruction. There, they can get or give tips not only how to apply makeups or construct props, but what on works best to create the mood or the makeup in a lasting way.
“They’ll show you how to put things together, how to make things work,” she said.
Their sharing attitude goes beyond commerce: “If you have a problem, here’s my number. Call me,” she said, paraphrasing some of the people she’d met.
The hauntings go deeper than sights and sceneries. Haunters also utilize sound, scents and other sensory items to enrich the experience for their families and for the public.
Meyers is especially adept at make-up, using pure pigment, latex and occasionally accessories — like a rat gnawing on a cheek — to create characters. When they ran the haunted house, she managed to make up 30 helpers in 45 minutes every night.
One of her favorite make-ups involves turning a common circus clown into a frighteningly evil visage.
“I have a spot in my heart for clowns,” she said, “and the more evil and sinister and wicked they are, the more I love them.”
The Sinister Room and all that is in it attracts the Meyers’s children, Taryn and Joey, and their friends, and Meyers occasionally needs to lock the door when she leaves.
Joey helps paint the props and contributes to the creative side, she said, while Taryn, the actress of the family, helps carve tombstones and build other props. There are always more to be built, as Meyers thinks of other ways to haunt.
She has boxes of spiders and skulls that have yet to be opened, plus other items that she’s purchased at after-Halloween sales. She and Jody have taken classes to rig the skulls with electricity and LED lights to get better effect from them. She has built a bookcase with randomly sloping shelves that looks right at home in the Sinister Room. The rest of the decor carries out the mood, with a spider web-patterned sheer tablecloth and spider webs that she blew in herself, using a hot glue gun and an air compressor.
Around the room, sitting or standing on tables or in chairs, she’s placed a variety of over-sized character dolls. There’s Raoul and Hector and Harvey, the Gutless Wonder, whose innards, predictably, are extruding into his hands.
The dolls may be the ultimate evidence of her fascination with haunting.
“They say you’re definitely a haunt-aholic when you name your props,” Meyers said.