ROY, Utah — With everything going on in the world right now, couldn’t you use a good Halloween scare? Especially one that doesn’t cost you an “arm and a leg?”
Well, there’s a man in Roy who has just what the “witch doctor” ordered: a free haunted house right in his front yard.
It’s pretty amazing what Wyatt Harris has assembled on his lawn. Nine rooms containing ghosts and goblins, vampires, caskets, bats, a headless horseman, you name it… and it’s all free — a gift to his neighbors.
It’s the 13th year of the Harris Haunted House (5360 S. 3400 West) and 13 is definitely not an unlucky number for Harris. He walked FOX 13 News through and showed us some of the jump scares.
“Typically as you round that corner, her motion sensor kicks off and by the time they get to where you’re at, she actually jumps forward about a foot, screams, arms move out,” he explained.
Every October since 2012, Harris transforms his front lawn into a house of horrors — his labor of love.
“We got the vampires kind of inside the castle. These are really fun ones. This one is actually older than I am; it’s a '90s Halloween decoration. We got it from a haunted house in Salt Lake," Harris said.
He says it started with just a couple of rooms and his grandmother, buying one scary robot.
“And as I got older, started getting adult money, I was able to make some more purchases and it really skyrocketed," he said.
And he doesn’t charge a dime for the thrills and chills. He says he wants kids from all over — and adults — to enjoy this time of year as much as he does.
And after a long day of doing concrete work, he says this is actually therapeutic.
“This is a lot easier, a lot easier. It’s a little bit more enjoyable. I love them both, but less messy, less labor-intensive this is," Harris said.
Zoe and Levi Johnson had their Aunt bring them all the way from West Valley City. Zoe said it was definitely worth the drive.
“It was pretty fun and it was really scary," she said.
Levi agreed.
“Well, she made me go first, so I got all the jump scares, but the scariest part was probably the nun," he said.
Harris says thanks to social media, the word is out about his free, front-yard haunted house, bringing visitors like the Johnson siblings. And just last weekend, he also had a visitor from Alpine and another one from Provo.
He says things will really pick up next week, and on Halloween night in particular, there will likely be at least a couple hundred people visiting.
