Sometime in September, Bill and Cassie Wolcott's West Santa Rosa tract house started to disappear.
By October it completely vanished, replaced by the old ghost town of "Jose Ramon," a ghoulish burg complete with undertaker, jail and a hotel that has a creepy way of catching on fire multiple times between 6 and 9 p.m. every night, while never burning to the ground.
If you venture close to book a room at the "Wolcott Hotel," just be wary of the poor guy in the electric chair to your left, who endures an execution every time a passer-by presses a button. It sounds like a hive of wasps being crisped by a bug zapper.
Let lesser men attempt to outdo the Joneses with the perfect lawn or an impressive sports car in the driveway. Bill Wolcott is out to create the greatest Haunted Yard not only in his 'hood, but in all the land.
His "Wicked West Ghost Town of Jose Ramon Avenue" is registered with the Home Haunter's Association (homehauntersassociation.com). He is competing with some 400 other similarly obsessed homeowners in the U.S. and Canada for the coveted Mummy trophy. There are 42 Home Haunts registered in California. Wolcott's is in the only one in the North Bay.
An IT manager by day, Wolcott by night turns twisted, conjuring up the scariest props, bits and sight gags for what amounts to a Halloween theme park in his front yard. The home-made attraction, featuring a live action cast of costumed monsters recruited from the neighborhood, has been growing every year, drawing up to 100 fright-seekers a night.
You might think that would irk the neighbors. But part of Wolcott's winning strategy is recruiting a team. Bryan and Jennifer McCully and Chris and Kari Oswald, who live across the street, are members, helping to plot and build the elaborate set and special effects, which include a computerized light and sound music show and an interactive hangman set off by a button. Bryan McCully, a welder, builds many of the props effects in his Santa Rosa shop.
Wolcott's yard is the main attraction, with a complete haunted house set up behind a Hollywood-style Western front. Somewhere behind it hides the Wolcott's real house, where Cassie runs a home day-care center.
"The kids," Wolcott says, "love this."
The McCullys and Oswalds have set up side shows in their yards tied in to the theme. The McCully "graveyard" features tombstones and a chorus of pumpkins that light up to a spooky soundtrack synched with Wolcott's display via wireless remote.
Everyone has their job. The McCully's lanky son Billy, 18, is the main monster, a Pumpkin-Head Man who, when costumed, looms about 7-feet-tall and likes to jump out at people, eliciting screams.
"After he scares people, everyone wants pictures with him," proud mom Jennifer says.
The men do the construction but the women are not idle bystanders.
"We women have an opinion on the music and the decorations," says Jennifer McCully, who confesses to being just about as obsessed as her husband, if not more so. "I wanted the fire because I wanted it to look like (Disneyland ride) &‘Pirates of the Caribbean.'"
Wolcott started the tradition three years ago.
"The first couple of years we had the haunted graveyard," he said. "It was just a graveyard with a light show. Last year we decided to put in a walk-in crypt made out of this Styrofoam stuff. That was cool."
But when he was poking around online for ideas and saw what some of the other homeowners were creating, he realized he had to kick it up to compete.
The Home Haunters Association website is a whole DIY guide with detailed instructions and tool lists for making everything from an animatronic headless corpse with flailing arms to a flying UFO ghost.
Team Jose Ramon began planning in July. Wolcott wrote up a complete script - a hair-raising ghost story about the "Legend of the Rosa Witch" who came to haunt the old town of Jose Ramon - Santa Rosa before it was Santa Rosa - after one of Wolcott's ancestors made the mistake of burning an old hag's shack to the ground.
By September they were pounding nails in earnest.
"We had a couple of 12 to 13 hour days with three to four people working at a time," Wolcott says. "It probably amounted to over 100 hours."
There are no building code issues, he maintains, because nothing is actually attached to the house. After Halloween it will be disassembled and stored at a friend's ranch until next year. They went through about 150 two-by-four boards they got for free from a woman in Sonoma. Many of the rusty props were old things he's collected for years.
Wolcott spent many more hours laboriously mixing and orchestrating a musical light show, using $2,000 in high-tech software and controllers made by Light-O-Rama. The McCullys have a more modest set-up, a $300 system they won in a company contest over the summer. They spent another $200 on a wireless network to pick up a signal from the Wolcott's garage.
Their cemetery and singing pumpkins provide the tamer diversion for little spooks who might be afraid to go through the Wicked West Ghost Town to get a treat. Guests who just want to take in the light and music show can tune into the Wolcott's low-watt radio station - 87.9 FM - and watch from their cars.
This show is less about the number of lights than the special effects, which includes strobes, flood lights and neon. And there is the mood music - tunes for a haunting like "Monster Mash," "Thriller" and "The Munsters" theme song. Wolcott was able to program the show to turn on at 6 p.m. and off at 10 p.m. nightly through Halloween.
But the haunted town itself has to be populated, with Wolcott donning a sinister clown costume. Friends and family join the show and kids converge on the garage to pick out costumes and take a place in a coffin or behind the bars of the jail. Other volunteers direct traffic and lead kids to the haunt - or away from it if they're fearful.
Wolcott's buddy Todd Nelson of Valley Ford, a carpenter and key hammer-man on the team, said the best part of the production is how it brings people together and out of their houses.
"We all have our talents," he marvels, "and when you put them together, this is what we come up with.
"This has really changed how the neighborhood interacts with each other. We have big barbecues and block parties. It amounts to a unity for the community, which is huge and one of the thing people really need today. I just like to sit back and enjoy the fruits of what we've done for people. We're having a blast."
You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204.
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