Topline:
Arcadia resident David Arvizu has turned his front yard into a haunted house for about 25 years.
The backstory: It started off as something fun to do with his kids, but turned into something bigger, better, and more imaginative every year since.
This year's iteration: Arvizu's DIY haunted house this year takes up about 10,000 sq. ft. of his front yard and centers around the disppearance of a young girl in an old forest.
Some people build model toy trains in their garages, Arcadia resident David Arvizu built a haunted house.
That was about 25 years ago, after his 9-year-old daughter launched the idea the day of Halloween.
"It was 4 o'clock in the afternoon and I said, 'Okay, let's see what we can do,'" said Arvizu.
For the next couple of hours, he and the kids strung up black plastic around the garage and built a maze inside.
At show time, everyone got in position. His daughter stood at the entrance greeting visitors. Arvizu, decked out in a scary costume, was in the garage.
"My son was at the gate, hiding behind a pair of trashcans, dressed up with a chainsaw," he said. "He would pop up and fire off the chainsaw, and that would be our little topper at the end."
Arvizu says about a dozen neighbors showed up that night. One of them came back the following day to tell him just how much she'd loved the experience.
"She said, 'my friend and I went through it, and at the end when your son popped up, she peed her pants,'" Arvizu said. "And I said, 'that's it, we're doing this every year.'"
And every year Arvizu ups the ante — to the point where his passion project now spills over to about 10,000 sq. ft. of the front yard.
He started work on this year's iteration in late September, doing most of everything himself — now that the kids have moved out of the house.
"The lighting, the costumes, and all of the props and stuff like that. It takes a while," said Arvizu, who is a technical director at the TV station, FOX 11 Los Angeles, adding that he imposes a budget of under $1,000 for the project, most of which go towards construction materials that are reusable.
And there's always some kind of tinkering along the way. For example, he landed on this year's storyline only about a week ago — around a young girl named Bella, who got lost in a forest and was never seen again.
"We take the visitors on a journey to retrace her final steps. We take them through the old forests, through the old graveyard," Arvizu said. "And we take them through several different rooms to show the nightmares that she was experiencing."
The haunted house is split into two parts. The preamble is tonight, which sets up Bella's story. The finale happens on Tuesday — Halloween night — where the mystery of the girl's disappearance is resolved.
The haunted house opens at 7 p.m. and ends at around 9:30 p.m. on both nights, free of charge.
Arvizu expects about 300 to 400 people to visit his latest creation on the 1300 block of Highland Oaks Drive in Arcadia.
One word of advice, though — he recommends leaving younger kids at home.
"I would just say that it is very scary, people have had meltdowns inside," Arvizu said. "It's not for the faint of heart."