Haunted Garage offers the treat of hope this Halloween
- Ellie Ruel
- Oct 24
- 5 min read
Bad scares for a good cause: Earls family raises funds for Cure for Cade, Southeast Alaska Food Bank
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
For 15 years, Dan Earls has been transforming his garage into a haunted trick-or-treating cornerstone decked out with chilling decor from skeletons to spiders. He says it may be his last year before going on hiatus until his grandchildren are older, but his family isn’t convinced.
“Last year he wanted to retire and be done. And then, you know, Halloween falls on a Friday, so you cannot skip that day,” Geneva Earls, his daughter, said.
According to the Earls, the Halloween garage has turned into a community tradition. Sometimes the family sees lines that wrap around the street, or have stayed open past the usual hours to make sure everyone has a chance to experience the chilling performance.
“I see the people now that used to come here when I was little and they were teenagers, now come with their kids,” Geneva Earls said.
This year it will be open Oct. 29 and 30 from 5-9 p.m., 5 p.m. to midnight on Oct. 31, and 5-10 p.m. on Nov. 1 at 9420 Berners Ave., near the Juneau International Airport.
The price of admission is non-perishable food items, monetary donations to the Southeast Alaska Food Bank, or a contribution to Cure for Cade’s GoFundMe, which is raising money to treat four-year-old Cade Jobsis’s rare genetic disease. According to the fundraising page, the family recently met the $1.15 million goal to enter the clinical trials, but still needs to raise funds for travel and other expenses. Many community members, local businesses and fundraisers helped meet the goal, according to an update by Cade’s mother, Emma Jobsis.
“They're still gonna need funding. I mean, they got to where they need to be to start the trials, but they aren't far enough yet to finish the trials, so he's gonna have years where he's gonna need more help, more rehab, more physical therapy, more expenses,” Geneva Earls said.
For the Earls, the food drive is a way to encourage people to start giving back to the community before the holiday season. Last year they collected over 1,500 pounds of donations for the food bank.
“That's the whole hope, to push the community to keep donating and keep helping each other out,” she said. “We don't get anything out of it. Well, we get the joy of watching people get scared.”
Both Earls are fans of a good fright, especially when it supports a good cause. Dan Earls’ fascination with Halloween started when he was growing up in the Mendenhall Valley.
“One house had a long driveway and I had a coffin up front. And you’d sneak around the coffin, the wife would be there, she'd be handing out the candy, and as you're walking back by, the coffin would spring back up and the husband was in there, and you drop all your candy and take off running. And I always said, ‘Someday, I'm gonna get even with his grandkids,’” he joked.
He passed that love on to his children and started the decorating tradition by putting a witch and a Frankenstein’s monster on his front porch. It expanded outward from there, eventually becoming the full haunted garage.
A coffin with a vampire inside the hallway is the “body room,” harkening back to that childhood Halloween experience. Like most of the other featured frightful sights, the coffin is entirely automated and doesn’t require someone to crouch inside the box.
The lack of human presence is one of the selling points, Dan Earls said. Unlike other haunted houses that have ghouls or monsters chasing after those brave enough to enter, the garage is more of a performance.
“You don't want to scare a person to a point where they don't want to ever come and go back through,” he said. “You try to get somebody to look one way, as something happens behind them— the trick.”
If something has to be fixed or tweaked during the runtime, someone sneaks in through a hidden door and slips out unnoticed. There are two test nights before opening to ensure everything is running properly.
Even without a full lighting scheme, there are plenty of ways to distract visitors from the true scare. The walls, coated with black or gray tarps, are adorned with layers of strobing lights in moody seasonal shades, customized skeletons and figurines, spiders, flashing thunderclouds, and various drapes. Most pieces get a touch-up, like burnt flesh or extra coloring, and some he assembled himself–like a killer clown made with a pillow, spray paint, and an Ace Hardware apron.
Overhead, sound effects like eerie howling and crashing thunder echoed as gauzy ghosts floated from the ceiling.
“It's probably a full pallet, or a full flat of two by fours, four 100-foot rolls of black tarping, six rolls of duct tape, about three big commercial bundles of zip ties and extension cords,” Dan Earls said.
Over time the chosen theme for certain rooms has evolved. In the past the winding garage maze had pirates, a SWAT theme and COVID-19 nurses. This year’s decor spans a range of typical spooky motifs, with a full assortment of clowns, witches, skeletons and jumping spiders. According to Dan Earls, each room takes a day or two of work to put together.
“I try to get the kids in and just slowly get creepier as we go, so I don't scare the little ones, but I still have enough things that nobody sees and haven't been finished that'll make the adults jump,” he said.
Sometimes it takes more than one walkthrough to get the full picture and details. Since the setup is automated, groups have to keep moving so they don’t trigger certain scenes twice.
“I love when people come out and they're like, ‘I gotta go again. Did you guys mean to do this part? I saw this part. I didn't see this part. Can I go again?’” Geneva Earls said. “It's always fun and it's heartwarming to hear.”
The progression winds along the garage’s interior, starting in a pirate bar scene, meeting a trio of witches, winding towards a “gore” room, creeping through a body/bone hallway, and exiting through a graveyard that will have a lit-up clown car by Wednesday’s opening. The exterior is still in progress, but it will have a place for people to take commemorative photos.
“If this is Dad's hopefully last year, they'll come and say goodbye to him, wish him good luck,” she said.
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
