Styx & Bones Oddities Café Keeps Halloween Going Year-Round Off I-10 in Baldwin County

BALDWIN COUNTY, Ala. — When the jack-o’-lanterns go dark this weekend and the plastic skeletons head back to the attic, one small roadside business in Baldwin County has no plans to change a thing. At Styx & Bones Oddities Café, a coffee shop and pizza stop off the Wilcox Road exit on Interstate 10, Halloween is a permanent condition.

The café, which opened in July, sits beside the Styx & Bones Haunted Forest, a seasonal attraction that has become one of the better-known Halloween destinations in coastal Alabama. Both are run by Billy and Chelsea Gates of Robertsdale, who say the café has grown far faster than they ever expected.

In roughly three months, the shop has turned into something of a roadside attraction in its own right. Podcasters, paranormal investigators, families and people who simply enjoy a good scare have been pulling off the interstate to see what is inside.

“This has gotten bigger than we expected,” said Billy Gates, 45. “We really thought it would be people traveling by, and just stopping and grabbing coffee and getting back on the interstate. And that they got to see something weird in Alabama.”

From a haunted forest to a storefront

The café began as a practical idea. The couple wanted a permanent storefront to go along with the haunted attraction, and they noticed the area had no coffee shop.

“We wanted a storefront with the haunted attraction,” said Chelsea Gates, 34. “We thought that we could sell coffee since there isn’t a coffee shop here. Then we wanted to have food, and something that could bring people in. We thought, ‘we could do pizza.’”

Turning a small commercial building into the café, and collecting the props and memorabilia that fill it, took about three years. The work moved forward whenever the couple could find spare time. Billy works full time in heating and air conditioning, and Chelsea worked at the Buc-ee’s travel center in nearby Loxley.

The haunted forest itself has a longer history. Years ago, Billy and a group of friends started what was then called Darkwoods Haunted Forest as a fundraiser for 40 South Acres Farms, a petting zoo. Money from the attraction helped pay for animal feed and veterinary bills.

“It was more of a fundraiser for a petting zoo and to feed the animals,” Billy said.

After the farm closed, Billy and Chelsea renamed and reorganized the attraction within the past three years. The idea of a year-round horror-themed business grew in part from the desire to support the seasonal haunt with a steady storefront.

Handmade horrors and a few uninvited guests

Both owners grew up going to haunted houses and watching scary movies such as “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” Billy traces his lifelong love of Halloween to an elementary school teacher in Atmore who transformed his classroom into a makeshift haunted house every October.

That sense of homemade fright carries through the café. Costumes, puppets and elaborate set pieces made by artists from around the country cover the walls and shelves. The couple insisted on handmade details so the place would feel different from anything else along the highway.

“We wanted to make sure the details were done by hand where it was different and something that just was fun,” Billy said. “Whenever people would pass by the interstate, they would want to pull into an odd place.”

“We want it to be something silly,” Chelsea added. “We try to keep it spooky and scary at the same time.”

Billy’s favorite piece is a mummified Bigfoot head displayed in a glass-like urn on a fireplace mantel. It was custom-made by an artist in Orlando, Florida, who included a hidden surprise. According to Billy, the artist had worked on the 1980s film “Harry and the Hendersons” and still had the original molds for the teeth of Harry, the movie’s Sasquatch. Those teeth became an Easter egg inside the café’s Bigfoot.

Billy said the world of Halloween props and haunt design is much larger than most people realize.

“The Halloween world has gotten so big,” he said. “There is a whole world people don’t realize. The creativity is unlimited. When you go to the big conventions, the artists there are working out of their shops. Some of the things you see, the props, are being worked on in their garages. It’s amazing.”

He wants the café to be a showcase for that kind of craftsmanship.

“You can go to the Home Depot, Walmart, Spirit Halloween and see some fun stuff. But you won’t see stuff made like this. These are handcrafted. They are not made of plastic,” he said.

Meet Willie, and a mirror with a past

Not everything in the café was commissioned. Some items came from other people’s trash piles or from Facebook Marketplace, and those, the owners say, tend to come with the creepiest stories.

One is Willie, a wide-eyed ventriloquist dummy who sits inside a broken-down television set. Chelsea said no one has ever been seen moving him, yet employees sometimes find him facing forward one moment and turned to the left or right the next.

“He’s starting to get famous here,” Chelsea said. “He has a mind of his own.”

Across from Willie hangs a plain-looking mirror with what may be the café’s strangest backstory. Billy said he got it through Facebook Marketplace from a woman in Milton, Florida, who wanted it out of her home. She told him she had blamed ghostly happenings, including the sound of children laughing, on a house her family once lived in in Georgia, but the strange events followed the mirror to Florida.

Billy’s cousin told him about the listing but was too frightened to pick it up, so a friend collected it and brought it to the café. Chelsea said paranormal investigators who visited recently claimed the mirror holds a “portal” and may be the reason Willie seems to move.

Billy is not convinced, but he is also not sure the mirror is staying. He jokes that he may slip it into his cousin’s vehicle the next time she visits.

“It really don’t bother me, honestly,” he said. “But they keep saying they have these little things happening. Maybe we should just [get] rid of this mirror.”

A menu named for movie monsters

The horror theme extends to the food. The café serves coffee and pizza with macabre names, and Billy said the pizza is based on a family recipe. Menu items include:

• Jason’s Campfire Pie: pepperoni and cheese, named for “Friday the 13th” villain Jason Voorhees.
• Hellfire Pepperoni: pepperoni with a sweet, spicy sauce.
• Leatherface Meat Feast: pepperoni, Conecuh sausage, ham and bacon, named for the killer in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
• The Krueger: roasted bell peppers, Conecuh sausage and several cheeses, a nod to Freddy Krueger of “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”

For now, customers eat outdoors on a patio that overlooks the haunted forest. The Gateses plan to expand the menu and add indoor seating, either by enlarging the current building or moving into another one. Billy has even begun to imagine additional cafés in other parts of the country.

“As soon as we opened, we had influencers coming in here making videos and it kind of blew up,” he said.

Part of a growing horror economy

A year-round Halloween business is unusual in Alabama, but the café arrives as horror increasingly stretches beyond October into a year-round market of movies, conventions, collectibles, specialty shops, escape rooms, restaurants and travel destinations.

Horror fiction has been a bright spot for publishers even as Americans read less for pleasure overall. A report released this month found sales of horror fiction grew 39% in one year, helping fuel a rise in bookstores devoted to the genre.

The genre has also been strong at the box office, bringing in an estimated $1.2 billion or more domestically in 2025. That run continued this year with “Obsession,” an independent film from Mobile native Curry Barker that became a breakout summer hit and grossed more than $523 million worldwide. Barker is now directing a new “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” film; no release date has been announced.

Coastal Alabama’s long ties to scary movies

The Gulf Coast has its own long relationship with horror filmmaking, which gives a roadside café like Styx & Bones a natural local audience.

• Nearly 40 years ago, “Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood” was filmed largely at Byrnes Lake in Baldwin County, which stood in for the franchise’s Camp Crystal Lake. The film marked Kane Hodder’s first turn as Jason Voorhees.
• About a decade ago, Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning “Get Out” was filmed in Mobile and Fairhope. Made for about $4.5 million, it earned about $255 million in its original release.
• “Gerald’s Game” (2017), “The Final Destination” (2009) and “The Collector” (2009) also have filming connections to coastal Alabama.
• Though not a horror film, Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was filmed extensively in Fairhope, Mobile and Bay Minette.

The haunted forest has been busy throughout the Halloween season, and both it and the café have drawn heavy traffic and online attention in recent weeks. The forest will close for the year after Halloween, but the café will keep its doors open for anyone who wants a little more spooky fun long after trick-or-treating ends.