West Mobile’s Carriage Hills neighborhood is bracing for one of the biggest Halloween crowds it has ever seen, thanks to a family haunted house that has become a fall tradition for trick-or-treaters across the area.
Phillip and Joy Hughes, along with their six children and roughly half a dozen family friends, are staging their 14th annual haunted house this year, this time from a new address after relocating from the Regency neighborhood. The free attraction will be set up at their home on Horsemans Circle and will run from dark until 9 p.m. on Halloween night.
Last year, in their old neighborhood, the line of costumed visitors stretched down the sidewalk for much of the evening. With the move to Carriage Hills, one of west Mobile’s larger subdivisions, and Halloween falling on a Friday this year, the Hughes family expects turnout to top every previous year.
“It’s the biggest neighborhood that we’ve ever lived in, and with it being a Friday night, we expect a lot of people,” Phillip Hughes said of the anticipated crowd.
The haunted house has built a local following over more than a decade by leaning on a rotating cast of homemade scares rather than store-bought decorations. Past years have featured clowns that seem to appear out of nowhere and a blood-spattered mock morgue scene, with a family friend once dressing as the hockey-masked killer from the “Friday the 13th” films to stalk visitors through the display.
This year’s lineup adds new characters and additional scares, though Hughes was tight-lipped about most of the specifics, preferring to let visitors experience the surprises for themselves. He did offer one hint about the production’s climax, calling it something the family has “never done before” in over a decade of haunting the neighborhood.
Admission remains free, as it has been every year the Hughes family has put on the show, a point of pride for a family that treats the haunted house as a neighborhood gift rather than a moneymaking venture. Building and running the display each October requires help from friends who return year after year to take on roles ranging from makeup and costuming to acting out the scares themselves.
For families in west Mobile looking for a free, walkable Halloween activity, the Hughes haunted house offers an alternative to ticketed haunted attractions elsewhere in the region. Its longevity, now stretching well over a decade, has made it something of a local landmark for trick-or-treaters who plan their Halloween night route around a stop in Carriage Hills.
Residents planning to attend are encouraged to arrive after dark, when the display is in full operation, and to expect the kind of crowds that have become typical for the event in recent years. The haunted house will remain open through 9 p.m. on Halloween.