SAN FERNANDO : Halloween Tradition Comes to an End

Horror of horrors! A Harding Avenue house is no longer haunted.

An 8-year-old, neighborhood Halloween tradition has ended due to overpopularity. A homeowner who used to delight in devising elaborate decorations for his house and yard has called it quits because of the stress of crowd control.

Tom Santelmann began, innocently, with a few stuffed-pillow ghosts and some drugstore decorations. The kids liked it, so Santelmann, a machinist at Six Flags Magic Mountain, added a little to his display each year.

He put a skeleton on a Harley-Davidson and stuck an ax in its bony grip. He figured out a way to make the ghosts levitate. There were cracked skulls, bloodied monsters, gravestones, a collapsing wall and a mausoleum.

Word got around.

Last year, an estimated 2,000 children trucked through his house, gleefully screaming as they came upon his displays. The city had to close down his block of Harding Avenue to traffic to accommodate the crowds of costumed thrill-seekers.

The annual Halloween extravaganza became so big that Santelmann said it was no longer manageable. “After seven years, the show outgrew the home,” Santelmann said.

“It just got to be too much, the stress, the time invested, the money. I didn’t have enough people helping me this year.”

What about the kids?

“You bet I’ve got kids complaining,” Santelmann says, but enough was enough.

“I had just spent too much of my own time and money on this project in the past. There’s nothing I could do about it, the thing just became too big.

“It’s time for someone else to do it.”