Center Twp. woman turns property into 'Haunted Mansion' tribute
CENTER TWP — Kristen Kane goes in for Halloween in a big way.
She has decorated the front yard of her home at 128 Iroquois Drive in Timberly Heights with more than two dozen pumpkins carved in the likenesses of the denizens of “Nightmare Before Christmas” and Disney's Haunted Mansion ride, as well as cutouts of Jack Skellington and Oogie-Boogie and other characters from “Nightmare.”
In fact, she's such a Haunted Mansion fan one room of her house is decorated in a permanent tribute to the spook-filled attraction.
Kane said she started carving plastic pumpkins in July to be ready for Halloween. So far, she's carved more than two dozen using an Xacto and a hot knife to etch likenesses including Lock, Shock and Barrel and the mayor of Halloweentown, as well as the hitchhiking ghosts from the Haunted Mansion.
Kane and her husband, Shawn, are planning a Halloween party for Saturday, which coincides with Center Township's trick-or-treat time.
“I really do hope we get a lot of trick or treaters. I've been asking around the neighborhood. It depends on the weather, of course,” said Kane.
On that night for the party, Kane said, “I'm going to be Sally (the patchwork girl from “Nightmare”).
“I'm going to be made up by the makeup artist from the ScareHouse (haunted house) in Etna. I met her at party in the ScareHouse last year,” said Kane.
“I like a theme and that's the way it worked out this year,” she said.
“I don't like blood and guts and gore. I like ghosts and pumpkins and spookiness, but not gore,” said Kane.
Kane and her husband, a retail store manager, just moved into the house in January. They started their Halloween decorating in mid-September.
“It's done little by little, putting up the wooden characters and adding the pumpkins,” she said.
Kane is a Butler High School, Butler County Community College and Slippery Rock University graduate who works at the Atrium near Prospect as a banquet manager.
Kane's love for Disney haunts began with her first visit to the Haunted Mansion in Disneyworld when she was 5 years old.
“My grandmother was worried about how it would affect me,” said Kane, adding her 5-year-old self took it in stride.
“I think it is so well done and so detail-oriented and looks so authentic,” said Kane of the attraction.
That attention to detail extends to the Kanes' house, as well.
In the room she calls the parlor, she's tried to replicate the mansion ambience as much as possible.
The walls are covered with holographic pictures of her aunt and uncle, Jonann and Marty Dellen of Meridian; her grandmother, Beverly Scott of Renfrew; her husband and herself that shift into ghoul faces when the light hits them a certain way. And a chair is a replica of the “doom buggies.”
And she even got the china pattern — Spode Blue Italian — used in the mansion's dining room for her own dining room. She's amassing a set little by little.This attention to detail extends to the walls of the parlor which were painted to resemble the wallpaper in the Haunted Mansion.Jason Ruggiero, a professional painter in Butler, got the job after doing some ordinary painting in their home before the Kanes moved in.Ruggiero said to call the work labor intensive is an understatement.“Well, it was all freehand. I measured the room to get the diamond pattern laid out correctly,” said Ruggiero. “It took a lot of measuring.”“It was really something,” he said. “I'd not done a design like that. I've done murals. I've painted hockey logos.“There were 10 eyeballs in each design, and there were 200 designs, that was 2,000 eyeballs, and that's not counting going back to do the black,” Ruggiero said.He said it took him a month going eight hours a day, five days a week to paint the room.“I hope I never have to do something like that again,” he said.The 'Nightmare' motif extends to the wreath on the front door. It is a duplicate of the wreaths hung to celebrate Halloween in Disneyworld and Disneyland.“There are certain things you have to be very particular on, like the ribbon on the wreath. The black and white stripes are not perfect, they have to be crooked,” she said.This attention to the smallest element is why Kane thinks she is also a big fan of “Nightmare Before Christmas.”“I really like Tim Burton's style. He makes things creepy but not scary. And the details and all the work that went into those characters,” she said.“It's always been a big thing for the family. My great-grandma used to make my Halloween costumes,” she said.She has made multiple visits to Disney parks, including her first to California's Disneyland and it's Haunted Mansion in September.She said Disney does not simply duplicate its mansions.“The one in Florida is a more traditional haunted house. The one in California is a New Orleans-type antebellum mansion,” she said. “There's one in Tokyo and one in Paris. The one in Paris is called the Phantom Manor. I don't know about the one in Tokyo.”Kane said she probably counts the dining room of the mansion with its dancing ghosts as her favorite part of the experience.Kane's enthusiasm for all things Haunted Mansion doesn't extend to the 2003 Eddie Murphy movie of the same name.“It was OK. I just feel like they had little pops of the characters, but it would have been better if they had focused on them. They went off the track,” she said. “They didn't have the stretching portraits. They didn't have the dancing ghosts,” she said, noting two Haunted Mansion features omitted from the movie.Preparing for her Halloween extravaganza has revealed skills that Kane forgot she had.Working with hot knives and plastic and patterns, Kane said, “I just came to realize, 'Oh, wow, I forgot I could do this stuff.'”“The big part of it is my family. My aunt was huge help getting things done. She did my yard before she did her own,” said Kane.
