As children anticipate getting ready for Halloween, they will be surprised by a different kind of trick or treat at a local house on the west side of town.
For the past 20 years, Deborah Bond started a tradition to transform her home into a haunted house, not for profit, but in the spirit of Halloween.
“This is like Christmas to some people, that what it is to me,” Bond said.
Bond said that she tries to take a week off of work to start putting up decorations in September. She added that the project has gradually grown over the years to where her family and extended family now pitch in.
“Our last Halloween we must have had at least 3,000 people,” Bond said. “I had family from Denver, my other family from Dallas, my family here, my daughter lives here, helping out. My grandson, he’s a teenager, he had his friends it’s become a tradition for his friends to come over here since they were little all the way up to now they help out and they’re 18 years old now.”
Bond also describes this project as a therapeutic process during her favorite holiday.
“What sparked it was my dad was a big Halloween nut,” Bond said. “He died in 1995 and it had to do with cancer. It was a horrific death and he said if I don’t make it to Halloween bury me as a ghost. Henceforth, the story of the ghosts. That’s why I’m really big into it because mainly it’s in memory of him.”
Bond not only covers her house in spider webs, skeletons, and ghosts but she has even more decorations inside her home from items she’s collected over the years.
“When they come up and I see them in their costumes, that’s what I really love,” Bond said. “I love just the trick or treating aspect of it. It makes me think of when I was a child too and going with my dad and mom.”
