On a quiet street in Lexington’s Kenwick community sits a haunting castle filled with horrors, awaiting anyone who dares to enter.
Fog creeps across the floor, lightning flashes as a body rises on a table. The screams of those who entered before echo through the walls of the castle.
And at the end, a man stands with a remote, ready to greet people with candy and a smile.
Michael Cronk, the creator of “A Haunting on Lincoln Avenue,” has been “spooking” the people of Lexington for five years with a homemade walk-through haunted attraction right in his own front yard.
“We started decorating the yard about 10 years ago. Initially we had some gravestones and stuff like that,” Cronk said. “Our neighbor across the street actually did a spiderweb out of yarn, and we really liked what she did, so we asked her ‘Hey can we do that?’”
The Cronk family then took their neighbor’s idea and made their own tunnel of spiderwebs, reaching from the street all the way to their front door. Since then, Cronk said his haunt has only gotten bigger and better each year.
“It went up the whole sidewalk, and then each year, it reached out a little bit more and more and people started being drawn to it,” Cronk said. “I kept saying, you know, ‘I’d love to do a walk through experience,’ and so five years ago now was our first walk through.”
According to Cronk, the first walkthrough had cornstalks lining the walls, with zombie hands reaching out toward the trick-or-treaters as zombie moans and eerie music played through speakers.
In order to reach his own expectations, Cronk said he continues his haunts every year, changing the theme and making “bigger” experiences.
“Much to my wife’s chagrin,” Cronk said. “I’m actually thinking about next year’s theme as I’m building the current year.”
Most of the decor is reused for the following year’s haunt, according to Cronk, with the palettes, tarps and canopies often refashioned into the “skeleton,” or structure of the haunt.
“Last year the theme was a mausoleum and catacomb, and I was building the mausoleum walls, which is what you’re going to see when you first walk into the haunt,” Cronk said. “It made me think of a castle and so I decided this year I wanted to do a castle theme and make a castle Dracula.”
Every new haunt adds a big addition, according to Cronk, with this year being the castle walls, made out of large foam boards he found on Facebook Marketplace. Cronk’s son and his friend painted and cut the walls to make them more realistic and tattered, further adding to the theme and “aesthetic” of a decaying castle.
Cronk said he works from 3:30 p.m. until he “can’t see” and throughout the weekends to complete the project on time. However, he is not the only one that works year-round on the haunt.
According to Cronk, the haunt is a community project, with neighbors and friends helping plan and assemble the walkthrough for all of Lexington to enjoy.
“We broke ground on Sept. 20, and it was pretty much three weeks of solid work,” Cronk said. “Each year, I’ve got three or four friends who come help set up the palettes.”
According to Cronk, one of his neighbors, a former Vietnam War aircraft mechanic, helped rig all the homemade animatronics made out of a windshield wiper mechanism from Amazon.
“With Dracula, we used a pneumatic piston so that when it’s triggered . . . that propels Dracula forward to attack the victim, and it resets when it’s done,” Cronk said.
Another next door neighbor helps with the foliage around the haunt, Cronk said, this year providing her dead wedding flowers for the finale.
Although the haunt is free for all to walk through, Cronk said he takes donations and gives back to the community by donating the money to different charities each year.
“This year, we’re donating to London Tornado relief,” Cronk said. “Last year, we actually raised $1,200 and split it between food banks in North Carolina and Florida after the hurricane came through. So I think that’s one of the draws, is that it’s fun to go through, but then it’s also a fundraiser.”
