Introducing Dr. Wayne Gangi: Halloween Horror House Mastermind

"Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain."

So goes the famous line from the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy discovers that the magic around her is not really magic at all, but the work of one brilliant, quirky man.

That's pretty much the case at "" (562 Grove Street in Clifton, near the Montclair border) a venue that's rapidly becoming a place of local renown at holiday time.  Around Halloween especially, it's a true Jersey phenomenon.  But be warned: it's not for the weak of heart.  

For that matter, it's not for the weak of stomach either.

Everywhere you look is carnage, destruction, and death. Rats, spiders and mangled corpses fly through the air. Parading en masse around the residential lawn are ghoulish, bloody mannequins and deformed monsters. It's all fake, of course, but it tells a story. Multiple stories, in fact. Like a grisly Halloween movie come to life, this is a true assault on the senses.

I, like so many other local residents, have often driven past this House of Horror in the autumn and wondered—pardon the pun—"What the h*** is going on over there?" 

Thus, when I had the opportunity to meet the Man Behind the Magic himself, I felt very fortunate to ask him just that. And I found out that, like the Wizard, Dr. Wayne Gangi is anything but ordinary himself. A holder of a double doctorate in medicine and dentistry, Gangi has spent years crafting a world that explores his philosophy of life and death.

"My critics say I just throw all this crap all over the lawn, but there's a meaning behind all this," he says. "It goes a lot deeper. I want this to be a place where people can come to see things differently. This tests the reality of our own mortality.  People really do die.  Brides and grooms and babies. People who shouldn't die do, in fact, die."

Potent stuff to describe Halloween decorations. However, given the scope of his project, it makes sense in a certain way. Luckily, Dr. Gangi juxtaposes his dark musings with a fun-loving, childlike glee. The man adores Halloween.  

It all began, he says, in childhood. "I've always loved classic horror movies: Psycho, Frankenstein, Dracula. Not the new vampire movies, but the classic old stuff," he says. "I was addicted to Dark Shadows as a kid. People don't have a concept of true horror any more. True horror opens up the imagination."

Gangi also had a strong desire to connect with other people. He remembers, "When I was a kid my parents were frugal, you know, but they used to take us kids to places that had elaborate Halloween decorations—Park Street in Montclair being one of them. I decided I wanted to be the person with the decorations when I grew up. So now I'm someone else's destination." 

But just like Dr. Frankenstein, Gangi, at first, didn't understand the true power of his creation. 

"I started off using some old bridesmaid dresses to make a couple of witches to put on the lawn," he remembers.  "Then, before I knew it, miserable divorcees started bringing me their old wedding  dresses.  After that, it took on a life of its own."

Gangi says people donate old clothes to him regularly, which he stuffs with plastic bags and collects in his garage for Halloween. "I spend many evenings just watching TV and stuffing bodies," he remarks, straight-faced.  He also scours local stores for props because, quite frankly, three-foot-long rubber rats are hard to find.

However, when Gangi describes what actually happens at his house on a typical Halloween night, the magnitude of his vision becomes evident.

"It starts off with maybe 30 or 40 people in the afternoon. But by the evening there will be thousands. At some point there will be four or five guys with chainsaws standing on the peaks of the roof. They start coming down ladders and assaulting the crowd. You know, chainsaws make a really scary sound. I've taken the chains off the chainsaws, obviously, but nobody realizes that."

Uh huh.

"Then there's a team of gravediggers," he continues. "They walk through the crowd dragging something that looks like a body. And there are numerous witches here as well, who look like they've come out of their den, or lair, or whatever. Commonly, I'm Dracula or sometimes I'm a Psycho Clown or a Devil, walking through the crowd."

At this point Gangi leads me to the back of the house—yup, right over to the eight-foot spiders crawling up the walls—to show me his "Animatronics."

"There are different levels of horror," he explains, proudly lifting a veil off a life-sized, disturbing-looking robot in a white gown and straightjacket. "I have 10 to 15 Animatronics that are driven by air compression. This one's name is Crazy Kristin. When she's jolted by a volt of electricity, she starts screaming, shaking, and twitching, and saying she's going to get you later."

Okay, so now I'm feeling more like Clarice Starling than Dorothy. As Gangi shows me more Animatronics, he pulls aside rough black curtains hiding creatures contained in upright, coffin-like boxes.

"Here's 'Spitting Debbie' and 'The Groundbreaker' who, when he moves, looks like he's coming out of the ground," Gangi goes on. He shows me a chillingly lifelike version of Hannibal "the Cannibal Lector" alongside an unidentified silver, fanged female. 

Before I know it he's leading me into the garage to see Mike Meyers (not the one from Wayne's World, unfortunately) and a few other gruesome half-creations. There are also a lot of black electrical boxes and wires in the garage, a testimony to the technology involved in making the Animatronics come "alive."

"I also have nine to 10 smoke machines and a bunch of CDs that provide sound effects," he remarks. He pauses at a black-cloaked box at least seven feet tall.  "Here's the electrocution box ... a lot of things happen in there."

I don't doubt this for a moment.

"What I always say is, if we can get your hair standing on end, then we've accomplished our goal," he says.

As far as I'm concerned, this goal has already been achieved, ahem. I ask Gangi how one man can pull off something this elaborate by himself.

"I can't," he states simply. "I could never do all this alone.  My buddy Jim helps me a lot. And we have a bunch of young guys who come by, too."

Gangi's buddy Jim Bobenko is also his former patient. So how did they go from doctor and patient to co-conspirators?

I got a chance to ask Bobenko himself, who is an integral part of Gangi's operation.

"(Gangi) had a practice by my house, he became my dentist and then we became friends," he said.  "One day he just said, 'let's throw a couple of bodies out on the lawn.' So that's what started it. We like creeping people out.

"We start on September 1, putting down the wiring, the lights. Everything you see on the ground we do in October," he says. "I live four blocks from here."

In addition to Bobenko, I met a few of the young men who help Gangi out.  At least six comprise a "Security Team" that does everything from crowd control to disguising themselves as monsters. It suddenly dawned on me that these polite and helpful young men are probably the ones who will be terrorizing children with chainsaws later in the evening. 

"He calls us his 'little police department'," says Mark Gallo, a local construction worker who reports that part of the job is making sure the mood of the crowd "feels right."

As another member of the team, Mike Bandurski, puts it, "Every year there's at least one car you don't get a good feeling about."

"You can just tell," Mark insists. 

"Last year we caught kids with shaving cream and eggs."

Inciting a fever pitch of excitement into a crowd is enough reason for a security contingent, but Gangi says there's another reason he needs it: several years ago, part of his spectacular display was stolen. The robbers were never caught, and Gangi closed down his operation.

"I remember I was in the middle of doing a big procedure on a patient when my neighbor told me about it," he remembers. "When I went outside everything was just gone. The robbers left in such a hurry there were costumes and wigs strewn all over the street—even blocks away."

After that, he vowed to end the operation once and for all. But the next year he was back, bigger than ever.

Now, he says, "Our team has security down to a science. I still worry about theft, vandalism, people becoming aggressive. But if we feel like there's something developing we can slow things down. Also, there are police here—I'm on the frequently watched home list—and undercover cops are wandering through the crowd at all times." Fortunately, there has not been another incident. 

"Will I ever really stop doing this?" Gangi laughs. "Well, I guess my physical fatigue is the only thing that would ever stop me. How many 53-year-old guys would do this? But I still love it. I look around here, I don't have a fear factor—I just think it's funny. Maybe I'm immune to it, I've been doing this for so long."

So what's next for the mastermind of this hellish universe?

"Christmas!" he says. "I have a herd of deer on my lawn and 400 candy canes. I also have life-sized polar bears I got from some landscapers. Christmas is my 'atonement decoration' ...  meaning, to make up for how much I scare everyone at Halloween."

Official Hours of Operation at The Halloween House at 562 Grove Street in Clifton: 5-10 pm on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Trick or Treating is for kids only!  Last year over 3,000 candy bars were given out to children.

This article was first published on Patch in October 2010.