Ward bringing back haunted house attraction by popular demand
Photo by Jamie Plain
Long before the first screams echo from Daymon Ward’s front yard, people are already watching and waiting. By September, kids passing his Owensboro home start asking when the Halloween display is going up. Soon, skeleton construction workers appear in the yard — a playful warning that something bigger, stranger, and a little scarier is on the way.
They have good reason to be curious.
Ward has built everything from a working roller coaster to a massive pirate ship, but this year he’s resurrecting the attraction visitors have been asking for: the haunted house.
And it’s coming back from the dead bigger than ever.
The roughly 2,400-square-foot attraction will feature 14 individually themed rooms, custom-built effects, and plenty of surprises for the thousands of visitors who have turned Ward’s Halloween hobby into an Owensboro tradition.
“We did the full haunted house, which was by far our most popular event,” Ward said. “Last year we did the pirate ship, and the pirate ship was a very ambitious build. Everybody said, ‘Yeah, this is really neat. But where’s the haunted house?’”
Ward said he couldn’t just bring it back; he had to go bigger and better.
“Nothing will be the same as it was before, so anybody that came through it before will have a whole new experience,” he said. “There’s going to be some things that I can promise you nobody’s ever seen before because they’re things that we custom made.”
It is a long way from where the tradition began. In 2020, Ward and his wife were looking for something to do during a year when normal activities had largely ground to a halt.
They gathered a handful of skeletons, werewolves, and vampires, dressed them for a wedding, and arranged them around a large Victorian table Ward found on Facebook Marketplace for $50. Skeletons hung from the trees, and green lights illuminated the scene. They called it the Corpse Bride Dinner.
“It was just basically something where people would stop on Thurston Dermont,” Ward said. “They would stop in the middle of the road to take pictures.”
The display grew in 2021, but Ward said 2022 was when they really began to hit their stride. That year brought one of his most ambitious creations: a working backyard roller coaster.
Ward connected with another Halloween enthusiast in Chicago who had built his own yard coaster and documented the project on YouTube. The two traded notes, and Ward developed his own version with a wooden track and battery-powered car.
The coaster traveled through a dark tunnel before ending inside a 10-by-20-foot tent filled with clowns. There was just one major drawback: It only traveled one direction. At the end of every ride, someone had to push it back to the starting point.
“That somebody was me,” Ward said. “I had to bend over and push that thing back, you know, 75 times a night.”
The coaster only operated on weekends.
“My back couldn’t take much more,” he said.
The coaster was retired after one season, but pieces of it lived on. Ward repurposed its lumber as the attraction continued evolving, first with a zigzag walking maze featuring individual scenes and animatronics, then eventually with a full 10-room haunted house.
That haunted house featured black plastic walls and interactive animatronics throughout. One enclosed room used fog and lasers to create what Ward called a “laser swamp.”
Then came last year’s pirate ship. Ward spent months researching how to build it, communicating with another Halloween enthusiast in New York and sourcing components from around the world. He experimented with effects including cannons and fire towers.
“It took six months to find all the parts to make that,” he said.
The pirate ship was impressive, but the audience had spoken: They wanted the haunted house back.
Part of the challenge — and fun — is that Ward essentially starts over every year.
There isn’t enough storage space to save something as large as the pirate ship or a 10-room haunted house, so the major structures are dismantled and the next year’s attraction is rebuilt from scratch.
Construction generally begins in September and can take two or three weeks. Ward gets help from his son, daughter, brother-in-law, and several friends to frame walls, assemble animatronics and wire everything.
Ward also gives passersby a little show while construction is underway. Two skeleton construction workers wearing hard hats move around the yard every few days. Sometimes they hold plans. Other times, Ward positions them as if they are helping build the latest addition. The audience notices.
“If we don’t start construction in early September, we have school kids that stop by and say, ‘Where’s the Halloween stuff? We’re waiting for things to come up here,’” Ward said. “We’ve got an audience.”
While building a 2,400-square-foot temporary haunted house in a front yard might seem like an unusual hobby, Ward had some experience long before the first skeleton arrived.
He spent 18 years as manager of Towne Square Mall, where his work included large-scale marketing events and seasonal displays. He remembers building everything from holiday setups to 8-foot-tall Plinko boards for a “Price Is Right”-themed event.
“I’ve always kind of been involved in building things that are large scale for the public to use,” he said.
Today, Ward draws inspiration both from his own ideas and what he calls the “haunter community” online. He particularly gravitates toward the classic Universal monsters — Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, and the Wolf Man — rather than gore.
The goal is to scare people, but only so much.
“We keep it rated PG scary,” Ward said. “We don’t have anything bloody. We don’t have anything satanic. We don’t have any of that kind of stuff out here.”
Some weekends include live actors, which Ward admits can raise the scare factor considerably. He tries to let families know in advance when actors will be involved.
The attraction has also offered early low-sensory periods before the lights, sounds, and jump scares are activated. Ward said they try to make the experience accessible for wheelchairs as well, including making doorways wide enough to accommodate them, though navigating a temporary attraction built on grass can present limitations.
Mostly, Ward wants people to have fun.
“It should be something that’s fun and interactive that they can hopefully have good memories of when they get older, and they can remember that crazy house that had all the weird stuff at Halloween time,” he said.
Ward estimates about 3,500 people visit each year. Some neighborhood children come through more than 30 times in a season, occasionally returning every night to look for new additions. The evidence is visible by November.
“My poor grass usually can’t take it by the end of the season,” Ward said. “I have nothing but a dirt path.”
The attraction is free, something Ward said is important to him and his wife. They give out candy, welcome repeat visitors, and ask only that guests respect the property and the displays.
Over the years, the community has started contributing in other ways, too. People have donated props, including a skeleton mermaid for last year’s pirate ship. One family donated several Halloween pieces that will be incorporated into this year’s display, and Ward plans to include a small tombstone acknowledging the contribution.
There is also a more serious purpose behind the fun.
After the display grew into a walk-through attraction, Ward started accepting optional donations for New Beginnings Sexual Assault Support Services, where his wife Karla serves as CEO. A donation box and QR code are available, but admission remains free and there is no expectation that visitors contribute.
“It’s not anything we want anybody to feel obligated for,” he said. “If they feel like they want to make a contribution … 100% of that — we don’t keep a single dime that comes in. There’s no offsetting costs, nothing like that. It all goes to the agency.”
New Beginnings provides free and confidential services to survivors of sexual assault and their families across Daviess, Hancock, Henderson, McLean, Ohio, Union, and Webster counties. Its services include counseling, crisis intervention, medical and legal advocacy, and prevention and education programs.
Last year’s display generated roughly $1,100 to $1,400 for the organization, Ward estimated, though he said the haunted house year produced more because of its larger crowds.
Ward hopes to open the 2026 attraction every dry night in October, generally from about 6-9 p.m., though the schedule is weather dependent. Rain and high winds can force closures because many of the electronics and displays aren’t weatherproof.
And 9 p.m. is a firm stopping point, with Ward saying his neighbors deserve some quiet. For a few hours before then, however, the yard comes alive.
“My wife and I really enjoy it,” Ward said. “We didn’t have anything like this when we were kids to really go to.”
Seven years after putting six skeletons around a secondhand table, they now have thousands of people waiting to see what will appear in the yard next. And for Ward, that is enough reason to keep building.
“We love to hear the kids screaming out there,” he said. “And the adults scream as much as the kids do.” OL
