KAILUA-KONA — Timothy Ewing is like a coach, a brilliant, evil coach.
All year he masterminds. He takes what he sees from the previous year and diagrams how to make it all better, how to really fine-tune his team — skeletons, goblins, fog, mechanical voices — to really scare the holy heck out of kids.
Not just kids, but young adults, too.
Male, testosterone-pumping teens aren’t immune. Far from it. They act macho when they’re frightened and sometimes lash out, which is something Ewing observed over the years as he built and ran his haunted house on Sea View Circle.
“They’ll have a hard time busting through this,” Ewing said, pounding the half-inch plywood that makes up the newer, thicker walls to the haunted maze in the back of his house.
When some teen boys are scared, they punch, a tough mask draped over the face of spooked. And over the years, as Ewing was learning on the job, he saw that those fists sometimes broke through the thinner walls.
“They like to show off for their friends,” Ewing said. “‘I wasn’t really scared!’”
But they were and Ewing, game analyzer, adjusted. So this year, his 16th running his non-professional yet professional-looking haunted house, Ewing’s structure has the durability to withstand.
“Every year I’ve learned something new,” he said.
That’s the haunted house portion, though, a narrow, dark, maze with masks that blow air into your ear as you pass, and it’s in the back. First, when you enter at the driveway, it’s a graveyard of skeletons, pirates and dead bodies that reach out. The dead reach out because those who pass by trigger a sensor, a device the former California radio technician and scuba diver designed himself.
“I just learned things on my own,” he said.
So extensive is the set up, it doesn’t come down the rest of the year. The coffins with skeletons now have branches from trees and vines that have grown into them.
“We live that way all year,” said Ewing’s wife, Leah, about their home at 77-6518 Sea View Circle that looks pretty similar the 364 other days of the year, which is just fine with her. “It’s fun, we have a lot of fun with it.”
In fact, the growing in vines help make the experience all the more real. And it comes to life tonight, as it does every Halloween, a tradition Ewing says is just plain fun.
There’s the dead reaching out, a skeleton singing, weaving its head, and another one which is connected to a computer and camera operated by someone inside the house, allowing it to interact with each individual person to make the experience all the more personal.
“Like the skeleton is alive,” Ewing said.
And the driving force behind creating such an enterprise is remarkably simple.
“To scare the hell out of little kids,” he said. “And big kids, too.”
Ewing and his wife started the tradition in the Bay Area, just for fun (Ewing said he likes Halloween more as an adult than he ever did as a kid.). When they moved to Kailua-Kona, they waited the first year to gauge the general Halloween reaction. They saw trick-or-treaters and costumes and decided to rebuild it.
Piece by piece, skeleton by skeleton— some the very ones you see in doctors’ offices but garbed —he started building, motivated each year by getting a bit better, a bit scarier. The house at the bottom of Sea View is near a bus stop and one day Ewing heard kids getting off, teasing each other.
“That’s where you screamed, that’s where they scared you!” he remembered kids saying, pointing to his house.
“I heard them talking about how much fun they had, so I thought, well, I gotta start going to the way it was in California,” he said.
Now, after nearly two decades of tweaking, this year’s setup might be the best yet.
The haunted house has grown so much that Ewing expanded his deck a while back to make the maze that leads from the graveyard up front the ghouls and goblins in back longer. Ewing has enjoyed watching some of the neighborhood kids make it a little farther through the maze each year as they have gotten older, until they were finally able to complete it.
Some kids enjoy the haunted house so much, they want to go through eight, nine times, though they stop getting candy at the end, as they would after completing it the first time.
Ewing’s ability to entertain through scare tactics is helping a good cause too. To enter the haunted house, trick-or-treaters are asked to drop off a donation Ewing collects for the food bank. They get between 300-500 visitors a year now, and have collected 100 pounds of food in one haul before.
The show opens up at dusk on Halloween night and goes until about 9:30 p.m. Ewing admits that right before the opening he gets that pre-game anticipation, the hope that everything designed runs flawlessly. But mostly, he knows it’s just for fun.
“It’s my one day a year,” Ewing said.