MORGAN HILL
– The sounds of Aaron Nelson working in his backyard can be
heard all across the quiet neighborhood. He’s traded in his
business attire for a beat-up T-shirt and jeans, and dried black
paint covers his hands. As he shows off some of his work, he smiles
with pride.
MORGAN HILL – The sounds of Aaron Nelson working in his backyard can be heard all across the quiet neighborhood. He’s traded in his business attire for a beat-up T-shirt and jeans, and dried black paint covers his hands. As he shows off some of his work, he smiles with pride.
“It isn’t much now, but wait until it’s all set up,” he said.
As two young neighbors walk by his home at Madrone Mobile Estates, he asks of them “Hey, are you guys ready for the haunted house this year?”
“You bet,” one enthusiastically answers.
Neighbors easily can watch Nelson’s progress, as the 16-foot-tall entrance to his “Dungeon of Fear” protrudes well over the height of his fence and looms out over the street.
His yard is filled with strange odds and ends that, to the untrained eye, don’t look scary.
Among the items in the yard is a shopping cart with a bumper, lights, a horn and a license plate attached to the front.
“People see me as a pack rat,” he said. “The haunters, they see a production.”
Turn out the lights and attach it to a car battery, and shopping cart looks like the front end of a car driving at you through the dark.
“We want to provide a vision,” he said. “We don’t do the blood-gore thing. We do the element of surprise.”
Nelson, 24, exemplifies the spirit of the hard-working community he lives in. He is married with two children and is a sales representative at New Directions, a Morgan Hill company that does marketing for home builders. But each night after work, he returns home and continues his work turning Madrone’s 17,000-square-foot clubhouse at 200 Burchett Ave. into a haunted house for Halloween night.
Madrone Mobile Estates, located at the north end of Morgan Hill, is a small, low-income, family-living community with 1,100 people living in 187 mobile homes. At the break of day, the mothers and fathers living there leave their children, ranging in age from preschoolers to high-schoolers, to earn a living.
“It’s the families where mom doesn’t necessarily have the ability to stay home,” said Cheryl Gallardo, resident manager of the estates and Nelson’s mother-in-law.
Even without stay-at-home parents, family values at Madrone are well-alive, and those who live at Madrone put their children first.
“We want to do something extra to show someone cares about them,” Nelson said. “We want to feel like one big family instead of being separate.”
But it wasn’t always like this at Madrone. Gallardo took over as resident manager about five years ago, and said it wasn’t the same place it is now. She said the community has been cleaned up in the past few years and work from the activity committee to bring families together has helped to make the community a good place to grow up.
“It’s really become a nice little community, but it’s taken a couple years to get to that point,” Gallardo said.
Nelson’s parents first started holding a small haunted house for the kids at Madrone outside their home 11 years ago. What started with two-by-four frames and plastic has now become an indoor haunt in the clubhouse at the entrance of the community.
“It just evolved,” Nelson said. “It’s something (the kids) look forward to.”
Now the haunted house brings in people from across the area, drawing nearly 500 people last year, even with the high tension and nervousness brought on by the events of Sept. 11.
Not only does the haunted house bring people to the Madrone community, it brings in much-needed money to fund more child-related events at Madrone. Last year’s event brought in more than $500 dollars given from Nelson to the community activity committee. The return on the investment isn’t a whole lot, but Nelson said the focus is more on giving kids a safe place to be on Halloween and bring the community together.
“I don’t do this for profit,” he said. “We give out money to those who help us out, and we try to have fun at the same time.”
The activity committee uses the money from the haunted house to host other events during the year, including a Thanksgiving event, a Christmas party, bringing Santa Claus to meet the children and finances Madrone’s own Christmas choir.
“We do a lot for the kids to keep them out of trouble,” Nelson said. “There’s not a lot for them to do. What do they do when they don’t have anything? They get into mischief.”
The haunted house is redesigned and rebuilt each year with new attractions. This year, Nelson decided to invest $5,500 out his own pocket into the project, including $1,200 for a palette of plywood to help the haunted house become larger and better. Nelson hopes to have a full commercial haunted house for Morgan Hill ready for next year.
Ten to 25 members of the activity committee will help put on the haunted house on Halloween night by acting in the house, giving out treats and snacks at the end and making sure everyone is safe.
“Aaron sees big,” Gallardo said. “Thank God he has the activity committee to help him pull it off.”
Whether it’s through Nelson’s vision or through the other families who take part in the events that keep kids on track, anyone can take a lesson from the community at Madrone.
“A lot of people just try to make ends meet,” Gallardo said. “But they need to take time to enjoy (their childrens’) childhoods.”
