This Oak Park Halloween tradition keeps its community happily spooked | Opinion
Halloween, like so many holidays in America, has a component of community engagement that can sometimes be forgotten. But the residents of 33rd Street in Oak Park have truly embraced the opportunity the holiday offers to get to know their neighbors.
Each autumn, an otherwise unassuming block of houses in Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood transforms like Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, becoming a Halloween lovers’ enchanting nightmare of ghouls and ghosts, skeletons, spiders and other scary surprises that have delighted generations of trick-or-treaters.
Aimee Phelps and Danell Eshnaur have lived at 2833 33rd St. for nearly 20 years, and for at least the last 17, they have turned their corner yard and adjoining sidewalks into a free, immersible and walkable haunted attraction that draws hundreds of visitors each year.
The tradition has grown so large that at least six other houses around the same intersection of 4th Avenue and 33rd Street have joined in on the fun. Phelps said the house next door to theirs even has a clause baked into their rental contract that the couple gets to decorate their yard every year, too.
“There were no kids coming, and so it was kind of a ‘If you build it, they will come,’” said Phelps, an artist who makes many of the props herself. The largest of her builds is a mausoleum with an animated ghost wailing inside, and the smallest is a little ghost girl on a swing.
Over the years, they’ve supplemented the collection with store-bought animatronics and more than one jump scare. A favorite of many visitors is the “Soul Sucker,” which blows a lighted jet of fog from the victim doll’s mouth straight into the face of a dementor-like wraith. (Phelps said that last year, a young neighbor girl brought and offered up a few of her dolls for the soul sucker to snack on.)
“We’ve got a second- and even third-generation that’s coming through now,” Eshnaur added. “The kids that grew up with it are coming through with their kids and they come back every year.”
Eshnaur and Phelps only request voluntary donations of candy and batteries (to keep the ghouls and ghosties wailing all through Halloween) and on the night of the 31st, local fire dancers will perform a free show at 7 p.m. for about 40 minutes; the performers also request donations.
Just across the street from the haunted house, neighbor Tom Sumpter has been hosting Halloween parties in his garden for nearly 30 years. He remembers when the neighborhood would get together to build a haunted maze right down the middle of 33rd Street. He said he could hear the kids screaming with delight from his home as they moved through it.
“Those kids grew up, and the neighborhood changed,” Sumpter said. “Now, those kids come back with their kids, and they remember the parties we used to have.”
Sumpter’s haunted maze has since moved into his backyard, which serves as a community garden the other 11 months of the year. Sumpter and his daughter were busy setting it up in the days before Halloween.
The maze will be full of lights and smoke effects, and Sumpter said he relies on volunteers to add a little extra animation to the spooky scenes. His maze ends in Diagon Alley, which runs between 34th and 33rd streets, behind University of the Pacific’s Sacramento campus.
There, Phelps, Sumpter and several other neighbors and local artists have created a homegrown ode to Harry Potter, for which the alley is named. It has its very own Platform 9 ¾, a wand and broom shop, Dobby the free elf’s tiny home and other nods to the famous children’s book series.
Phelps said the neighborhood has plans to grow the art installation even more in the future, and this Halloween, some students from the University of The Pacific will be handing out candy in the alleyway.
(Those interested in volunteering at the haunted maze can email Sumpter at sumpter.tom@gmail.com. More information about Phelps and Eshnaur’s haunted house can be found on Instagram at @oakparkhalloweenhouse.)
Like many communities that gather together to put on a Christmas light show or a neighborhood block party on the Fourth of July, these kinds of community-run events foster a sense of belonging and social cohesion — something that has felt lacking for many people since the pandemic.
Perhaps consider 33rd Street’s annual haunted neighborhood event as a form of mutual aid: The voluntary, often grassroots, exchange of resources and services within a community for the mutual benefit of its members. On 33rd Street, joy is the mutual benefit — garnered via delighted shrieks.
“We just really love the community it brings together,” Phelps said. “We do it for the love of it.”
