Orléans Halloween house will live on past this year, but smaller

It’s just after 6 p.m. when Patrick Albert springs out of his car with a smile on his face and walks up the driveway of his parents’ Orléans home.

It’s been a long day of driving for his day job working on vending machines, but, if it’s taken a toll on him, he doesn’t show it.

That might be because the next part of his day is what he describes as his “little vacation.”

He immediately gets to work turning on lights and flipping switches as dozens of spooky inflatables breathe to life on the front lawn of the famous Albert Halloween House on Pintail Terrace.

Over the past 26 years, Albert Halloween House has become a well-known spooky community staple, welcoming as many as 3,000 visitors each October in recent years while raising more than $100,000 total for CHEO.

But, after a neighbour’s bylaw complaint put the future of the Halloween House into question, Albert is now promising his visitors that this year won’t be the last.

Next year, he said, the Halloween House will be a bit downsized.

“We’re still doing the front (lawn) and the castle next year,” said Albert, adding 2026 will be the last time the backyard will be part of the attraction. “So we’re pretty much going back to 20 years to what we used to do.”

For the community, it’s welcome news following the Albert family’s original announcement in July, which stated the Halloween House would be shutting its doors for good after this year.

“But, with the amount of people liking and supporting it, we decided to stay open,” Albert said.

Earlier this year, the bylaw complaint found that the Halloween House’s permanent installations, including a 18-by-20-foot plywood castle in the driveway, violated residential zoning bylaws. After reaching an agreement with the city, the structure was permitted to stay up until the end of October.

Bringing the house back into bylaw compliance, Albert said, the castle will be downsized to 6-by-20 feet, less than half of its current stature, and will be something he takes down after Halloween rather than leaving it up year-round.

“That was the problem,” he said. “We’re not supposed to keep it up, and I’ve kept that up since the pandemic.”

While it won’t be a total farewell to the Halloween House, Albert said he hadn’t yet come to terms with the fact that things would look quite different this time next year.

“I don’t think it’s hit me, to be honest with you,” he said. “It’s been this size for almost 15 years now that the back area has been that big.”

He said the backyard had quickly become one of the most exciting parts for visitors. While the front yard looks largely the same each year, his team of 10-15 volunteers thinks up a different design for the backyard each summer.

This year, it’s a winding maze with lots of sharp corners that make for great jump scare potential — especially when it becomes harder to navigate in the pitch black.

After Halloween comes and goes at the end of the month, the major downsizing will begin. Albert said he already had a construction bin booked to throw out the plywood castle and other boards from the backyard.

As for the thousands of Halloween decorations he’s collected and been gifted over the years, the plan is to sell as many of them as he can this spring at the Orléans garage sale with all that money going to CHEO.

As he steps back to admire at how much the Halloween House has grown over the past two decades, Albert said these last few weeks before Halloween night would be about soaking up the spooky magic.

He says it’s been a great way to get to know the community, with more new people coming to the house this year thinking they’ll be walking through the house for the first and the last time.

“When they come through, we tell them we’re going to keep the front (open next year),” he said. “A lot of them were pretty happy when they heard it was still going to be up.”

He also hoping this year will be the biggest yet for donations to the children’s hospital. On a Wednesday, he said he raised $600 for CHEO in one night. On a Saturday, he raised another $1,300.

As for Albert, he’s starting to think about what it’ll be like to have a little more free time on his hands. Instead of starting setup in July, his team can put together the downsized version in September.

“I can actually have a summer for once,” he said, chuckling.

With the current plan to open on weekends only next year, he has also had to think about how he’ll spend his fall evenings, but he doesn’t think for a second that his Octobers will be any less spooky.

“I’m excited to see some of the other Halloween things in the city,” he said. “We haven’t seen Pumpkinferno (at Upper Canada Village) in a while, and a friend of ours is an artist and does different things with pumpkins.”

The Albert Halloween House is open from Wednesday to Sunday from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. throughout October. Saturdays are jump-scare nights starting at 7:30 p.m.

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