AURORA, Colo.—When Pandora Rose moved with her husband and two daughters to a home in southeastern Aurora more than a year ago, they had very specific questions to ask their local homeowners’ association.
How would the neighbors feel about towering, wrought-iron fences? How about hulking, humanoid pumpkin creatures standing on the front yard? Any hang-ups about giant cauldrons glowing with green light and spitting fog?
“I asked them specifically if there were any issues with decorating for Halloween,” Rose said, standing amid the massive pumpkin monsters and giant spiders arrayed on her front lawn in the Carriage Place neighborhood. “When we started putting things up, everyone was just astounded by the lengths we were going to at that point.”
For the fourth year in a row, Rose and her family have transformed their home for the Halloween holiday, turning their yard into a free haunted house for trick or treaters of any age. The Darkrose Manor is an eerie tableau that includes a meticulously constructed witch’s shack, a gallery of nightmarish creatures and a towering fence that surrounds the entire property.
It’s a tradition that started in 2007 as a novel way to celebrate Pandora and August Rose’s wedding anniversary.
“Just for giggles I happened to be in Walgreens shopping for something and I happened to see all of their Halloween stuff set up in the aisle,” Rose said. “I thought just for giggles … I loaded my basket up, went home, started decorating. It was all cheesy stuff.”
Her husband loved Rose’s eerie additions, and the motifs quickly became more than just a novelty.
“We had such a great time just dressing up and sitting on the front porch that night that we thought, why go out on our anniversary when we can just have fun dressing up our house instead,” Rose said.
This Halloween will mark the second year the Darkrose Manor has operated in Aurora, after the Rose family moved the attraction from their old home in Denver’s Washington Park neighborhood.
But Rose, an artist and website designer, said it has already become a beloved tradition in her new neighborhood off Tower Road in Aurora, one that draws contributions and participation from the neighbors. The community interest helped the Darkrose Manor attraction survive its first Halloween in Aurora, Rose said, after a holiday blizzard threatened to derail the project.
“My neighbors started bringing me things,” Rose said. “A neighbor came down with pumpkin spice bread and said, ‘We just love what you’re doing. This has really brought something to the neighborhood. Please keep doing it.’
“That changed everything,” Rose added. “That really reinvigorated us to actually get it done despite the snow.”
Turning a single-family home into a gothic attraction requires such inspiration, Rose said. The search for materials—thousands of feet of irrigation tubing, heaps of spare lumber and countless set pieces and baubles—starts long before Halloween. The cost can reach more than $2,000, depending on how many materials are donated from friends, family and neighbors for the effort.
“We probably make easy two to three dozen trips to Lowe’s or Home Depot throughout the build process. We start somewhere in June and start setting up at the end of September,” Rose said. “It takes us pretty much up to the day of Halloween to get it all done.”
The effort is a family affair. August Rose, an electrician by day, helps build the complicated circuits and lighting design for elements like the glowing cauldron and the illuminated witch’s shack. Pandora Rose, who sells “creepy art dolls” online, constructs and sculpts the attraction’s monsters out of papier-mache, polyurethane and other materials. When they’re not in school, Rose’s two daughters help with the effort.
Even Pandora Rose’s mother, Jean Millard, contributes, commuting from Colorado Springs to donate materials, offer financial support and tramp through the yard to help put the Darkrose Manor together.
“I help them as much as I can,” Millard said. “This year was a lot of dragging out debris and laying stuff. It was quite a bit of work for me this year.”
But Millard insists she doesn’t mind the extra work.
“Just to watch it develop is so cool,” Millard said. “I help a lot with the details … I’ll be making the signs this year.”
Pandora Rose insists the mission of Darkrose Manor is distinct from professional haunted houses that run during the season. There are no costumed teenagers hiding in crooks and crannies, waiting to jump out and scare visitors. No one wielding a chain saw will chase trick-or-treaters off the property.
Instead, the goal is to create a visceral sense of mood and place, to offer a seasonal atmosphere that boasts a more subtle effect.
“We don’t do the startles and scares, we don’t do the blood and guts,” Rose said. “What we hope to leave people with is that sense of ‘eww’ as you’re going through, something that you’ll think about as you go to bed.”
