Long Beach’s most grassroots haunted house is back with its biggest cast yet for another year of screams.
Fairbrook Manor in East Long Beach is a haunted outdoor labyrinth at the home of Robert Duck.
Duck and his family build the elaborate sets themselves and feature a volunteer cast of scare actors from local schools.
This year features 30 kids scattered throughout the maze, which will explore “a different part of the manor,” Duck said.
Sets include a study, pantry, attic and sitting room. Outdoors scenes will be a pet cemetery, snake pit and a “farm on fire” with red lighting and smoke-scented fog, Duck said.
For the skittish, any child can opt for a “bravery torch,” which signals that the visitor does not want the full scare experience.
Entry to the haunted house is free, but there is a suggested donation of $5 per person. All proceeds go to the Long Beach Rescue Mission, which has provided food, clothing, shelter and other services to unhoused people since 1972.
Visitors also have the option of bringing canned goods, hygiene items or non-perishable items for donation bins that also go to the rescue mission.
Five years ago, Duck started Fairbrook Manor about eight children he recruited by sending fliers to local drama teachers. Since then, it’s grown into an annual charity drive that has raised roughly $17,000 and 40 barrels of donated goods for the Long Beach Rescue Mission.
Duck wrote the haunted backstory himself, which is displayed on a sign outside the maze.
It features a Long Beach widow in the early 1900s who kidnaps local children in an attempt to cover the grief of losing her husband and two sons.
Each student actor in the maze — ranging in age from elementary to high school – crafts their own character, including Duck’s 12-year-old son Xander.
Four students have been acting in the maze for all six iterations, and two have “graduated” by getting jobs at Knott’s Scary Farm.
Fairbrook Manor is open from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. this Saturday, Oct. 18, and Sunday, Oct. 19, as well as Oct. 25 and Oct. 26 from 12 to 3 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. A scare-free, display-only daytime tour will be available on Halloween. Donation bins will remain outside the house until Nov. 2.
Visitors are encouraged to park along Bellflower Boulevard or in the parking lot of the nearby shopping center.
This year’s maze will have at least two new observers: a pair of cats the Duck family adopted through their neighbors.
One of the felines, a black cat named Renfield, was born in a cemetery.