Kristyn Rossetti of West Chicago has something in her neighborhood that’s hard to resist.
“I love Halloween, and we always drive past this and I wanted to bring my son over in the stroller and sort of start the Halloween tradition,” Rossetti explained recently while enjoying the Halloween decorations at a house in town. “It looks good. It’s a little scary and it’s a little over the top, but the more over the top the better for me.”
Folks offering Halloween decorations this time of year are pretty easy to find, but the display people can experience at the McCabe home in West Chicago just across the border from St. Charles is a definite show-stopper.
The brainchild of St. Charles East High School student Miles McCabe, 17, a display dubbed Lehman Manor has been growing in size as well as viewers on the 2700 block of Lehman Drive in West Chicago for years.
The McCabe display is so impressive it’s getting national exposure.
“The Great Halloween Fright Fight” on ABC-TV, which was first launched in 2014, selected the McCabes’ display as one of four finalists competing last Sunday for $50,000 in prize money. The McCabes’ display won the prize.
“We started putting things up about two months ago when we started getting ready for the TV show,” Miles said.
Miles’ mother Rachel McCabe said the family display got a lot of exposure thanks to being “on a lot of haunt pages on Facebook.”
“Four homes were hand-picked by ABC. They came out about a month ago, and there will be one winner,” she said. “We were completely set up earlier to do the show, but because we live in Chicago with the rain, wind and what have you we had to take a lot of stuff down and put it up again.”
The McCabe family is so into the holiday decorations that the family drives all the way to Greeley, Colorado, to the Distortions Unlimited factory with a trailer to bring the animatronic items back for the display.
“There’s no ordering online or having something shipped,” Miles said. “With the professional stuff we go out there and get it.”
He explained he found his first device so compelling he just kept acquiring more.
“This all started when I got my first life-size animatronic and after that I just started collecting. It was mainly about that and the life-sized props,” he said. “It just built up to where it is now. We have a full walk-through experience and tons and tons of stuff to see.”
The McCabe walk-through runs through the garage before continuing on to side of the house and then to the back yard before returning to the front.
“We had about 4,000 people come through last year,” Miles said. “We have over 150 life-sized animatronics and there are probably about 10 different themes within the whole walk-through. The animatronics alone probably cost between $50,000 and $60,000.”
One might think that the 17-year-old’s hobby was being bankrolled by generous parents, but young Miles matter-of-factly explains he’s paid for everything himself.
“I’ve paid for it. I’ve bought all the props myself through the YouTube program I have,” Miles said. “Mainly what I do is instructional set-ups of animatronics and people go and buy the same animatronics and need to know how to set them up for their own haunts, and I do that as well as showing the walk-through of our haunt.”
“He’s got close to about 80,000 followers on YouTube and has bought all the props himself including the professional props,” his mother said.
The choice of going with a Halloween display versus Christmas or something else “was because of the animatronics side,” Miles said.
“With Christmas it’s more about the lights and stuff like that and other holidays there’s really no life-sized characters like this, but Halloween is the one with the most life-sized monsters and I’ve always loved that,” Miles said.
Two months is needed to set up the display and when it comes times to store everything away, the McCabes said they just rented a warehouse where all the witches and goblins can be stored.
“For a while we just had two large storage units to store everything off season, but now we have a full warehouse building for storing animatronics as well as fixing stuff,” Miles said. “I never thought things would get this big. It was probably two to three years ago when our walk-through was gaining popularity and that’s when I thought we should take it up and make it as crazy as possible.”
Currently, young McCabe said he has no college plans and is actually considering starting his own business which might include “opening a professional haunt.”
“A professional haunt is pretty amazingly a very fast-growing business right now, and so I want to eventually get a permanent space and run this each Halloween season and be open for a few other seasons,” he said.
Feedback from visitors has been extensive over the years, Rachel McCabe said, noting that “after this (TV) show we’re probably going to get a lot more.”
“What we do because this is a little scary, we have designated hours for kids. Every day we’re open, we do a non-scare … where kids can come in the daylight,” she said. “Usually at 6 p.m. that all shuts down and its full scare where we go all out with music and live actors and the whole thing.
“We’re still a residential haunt and it started with little kids coming and it’s grown into this giant thing,” she said. “We want to make sure kids still get to enjoy this.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
