Spooky season has officially returned to the Cowichan Valley. The Big Shop of Horrors Haunted House started up its scaring operations on Friday.
Organizer Daphne Swift says the community has been instrumental in growing their scream factory.
“We came up last year with well over 4,000 people going through the haunt and we were able to donate $30,000 back into the community,” says Swift. “It’s amazing the community support we’ve had and the beautiful wonderful people that we’ve met along the way that have just called us and say, ‘We’ve heard about you. What can we do to help?'”
Swift says she’s not going to give away any secrets, but she says over half of the rooms are new or completely repurposed. The process of getting things set up takes a little longer than you might think.
“The process starts in January,” she says. “We have a design meeting and decide what rooms we’re going to do this year, what rooms we’re going to drop, and add new rooms. Then we pretty much meet every two weeks after that. We start building September 25 and the decorating team came on October 1 this year.”
It’s the second year the house has been hosted at the Cowichan Exhibition Grounds, Swift says they simply outgrew their previous location – which was the shop beside at their house. Their first haunted house was in their basement for a murder mystery night in October 2015, and they decided to open it up to the public to raise money for charity.
“We put it out at the last minute on Facebook, let friends and family know, and we actually raised over $300 that first year in the last 24 hours,” says Swift.
From there they took the next year off while they researched how to produce a larger haunted house, and in 2017 built one in their shop which was large enough for storing a transport truck. A thousand people in their first year turned to two thousand in their second and 2,500 in their third. Parking and other logistics became a problem for hosting it at their shop. That’s when the Exhibition Grounds reached out and offered to let them use the space on their campus.
This year, all proceeds will be going towards Big Brothers Big Sisters Cowichan, MS Canada, and the Full Cupboard, which supports Cowichan Valley food banks. You can get your tickets online on Eventbrite or in person at the Cowichan Exhibition Grounds.
