There’s really nothing quite like Halloween in New Paltz. One of the village trustees, William Wheeler Murray, likes to call it a high holy day in the community, because it seems to be celebrated more widely than any other special day on the calendar. The community costume parade is a tradition that stretches back into the middle of the last century, forming a cord on which other events can be hung like baubles. One of the brightest of those ornaments was the Guenther haunted house, an irreverent and gory gift to the community that was hosted by Dan and Ann Guenther at their Center Street home for decades, from 1982 to 2012. Ready to reminisce, Ann Guenther agreed to sit down for an interview about Halloween and those over-the-top attractions.
Ann grew up in Evanston, Illinois, in the shadow of Northwestern University. From kindergarten onward, theater students would come to Ann’s class and help the kids act out all sorts of parts, from witch to robber to princess. “I was raised to be theatrical.”
That theatrical kid eventually moved into New York and met Dan, a talented carpenter who had rightly earned a reputation as a hardcore prankster in college. Their many shared interests helped lead them to marriage, and they started a family in the Vly, that idyllic and very rural Marbletown hamlet. It was quiet. Too quiet. While they were both ardent environmentalists, rearing a family in that remote part of the county felt like torture to Ann, who as an extrovert, could thrive best when surrounded by others. They found a house in New Paltz, and moved their young family there post-haste.
It started out small
Halloween had already been a big deal in New Paltz for a long time at that point, but for the Guenthers it started out small. Ann just went outside with a cauldron full of candy. The amount of candy required grew, and grew, and grew from one year to the next. They started decorating the yard, but eventually things started getting serious.
“One year, Dan cut the end off the porch,” in order to put in a rope bridge for a rainforest-themed event. “After that, it was anything goes,” Ann recalled.
“Anything” included drawing in a lot of help. They again turned to students of the local college — SUNY New Paltz had an arts focus in the 1980s — to pitch in with sets, costumes and actors. Each year was built around a new theme, and all of these were irreverent: cafe grotesque, huge snots to parody the Huguenots, Y2K, malice in wonderland, and carnivore cruises were a few examples. Ann, who was particularly good at running meetings, coordinated the brainstorming; Dan organized the annual construction project that transformed the Guenther house. Many years, the idea that “if it bleeds, it leads” seemed to be the organizing principle.
A massive undertaking
Transforming the house was always a massive undertaking. For the extraterrestrial year, it involved putting a flying saucer on the roof. The high-school-themed event required parking a school bus out front. One year, they flipped over a car in the yard. For the Christmas theme, the Guenther kids brought home a dead deer to decorate as Rudolph. Dan had a gift for networking, and always managed to know someone with just the prop that was needed, such as a school bus or an old highway culvert.
Ann also drew on community ties. Always cast as a central character, Ann would call out visitors by name as part of a calculated strategy to make them uncomfortable, and disorient them. Other tactics included deliberately separating families, using fog machines heavily enough that it was hard to tell if one was inside or out, and injecting flashing lights into darkened hallways. Their son Mark would sometimes take candy from children who held out their bags, and were expecting a different result.
A labor of love
Guenther houses took months to plan and build, and attracted 2,500 to their door at the peak. It was a labor of love, and given away for free; they never charged admission. Most of those who went through enjoyed the experience, but Ann did recall trying to convince some parents that what was inside might be too much for young children. When those parents insisted, the young ones “would be crying in half a second.” Middle-school boys tended to show a lot of bravado going in, but Linda — the more introverted of the Guenther children — could usually throw them off-balance with a well-timed grab of the ankle. As those unsupervised youngsters sometimes acted out by punching actors or throwing objects, guards were eventually needed among the volunteers. “It’s amazing what we got away with. We kept the child psychologists in business.”
The whole family was involved. Dan got to be a disembodied head on a table, have entrails pulled out for all to see, or be impaled on a pitchfork. Linda got to spend one night eating a concoction of oatmeal, relish, and other unpleasantness — and then throwing it all up. Mark, the other Guenther child, once told local police to “move along” while dressed as a military officer. Ann, a method actor to the core, once played a newscaster well enough that a local photojournalist assigned to cover the attraction was fooled. Even after leaving home, Linda recalls that the younger Guenthers would come back for Halloween, because it was a “big family religious holiday.”
Evidence that this event was beloved is suggested by the letters to the editor. Among many of gratitude and praise, Ann recalls only two that were negative. One was penned by someone upset by the roadkill deer. The other was inspired by a parody of the county fair, which included actual dead chicks on sticks as the fair food.
Most, but not all, of the neighbors were supportive of the Halloween bomb that was dropped on their block each year. The construction usually began in late summer, and anyone on Center Street who wasn’t prepared to hand out metric tons of candy needed to keep their homes dark and unwelcoming. It took volunteers a couple of days to clean up afterward, as well.
Discomfort was the name of the game
For 30 years, private citizens transformed their own home in a spectacle that evoked fear, loathing, and adoration among their neighbors. While they always let local authorities know about their plans, they broke a lot of social rules to ensure that discomfort was the name of the game: they got personal enough to grab ankles and call out names, disrupted the neighborhood with wrecked cars and big construction projects, and crossed the line over and over again with stunts like putting dead animals on display. The Guenthers relocated the haunted attraction to the old Hasbrouck playground for its final year, in 2012. Dan died shoveling snow in 2021, and the house was recently sold. The new owners were informed of its part in the Halloween history of New Paltz. There have not yet been any reports of haunting in the area, but time will tell.
For a complete rundown of Halloween-themed events in Ulster County, check out this week’s Almanac section
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