Agoura neighborhood transforms for Halloween
By Stephanie Bertholdo  bertholdo@theacorn.com

FAMILY AFFAIR--Decorating Hempstead Street houses has become a community tradition.

Ghoulish pranks, high-tech frights and candy galore lure thousands of children into a local cul-de-sac where families are united in their quest for an extreme Halloween.

The good people of Hempstead Street in Agoura Hills are a frightful bunch. For more than a decade they've been transforming their homes near Morrison Park into a "Haunted Hempstead" for Halloween night.

Dina Barmasse said she has been scaring the dickens out of children for 10 years. The families who live on Hempstead take a no-holds-barred attitude toward Halloween, employing high-tech animatronics, interactive activities for children--and kids at heart--and gruesome movie studio props not meant for the faint of heart, she said.

The Cutbill family has been into the swing of house transformations for six years. They once turned their garage into a scene from the television drama "ER" thanks to a friend who works on the show and lent them gory medical props and realistic body parts, said Angela Cutbill.

SPOOKY--One of several skulls that light the Barmasse lawn.

"We've gotten much weirder and darker over the years," Cutbill said. Last year, they placed a dummy of pop singer Michael Jackson on the roof, which was weird enough, but Jackson dangling babies off the roof was a move into the macabre, she said.

The body of Osama Bin Laden hanging from a tree at the Cutbill house of horrors was another instance of the family going beyond the usual ghosts, goblins and gore.

"It was a prop and a statement," Cutbill said.

While some families deck out their homes with a theme in mind--say, pirates--the Parker family builds something new every year that relates to a popular movie, Barmasse said.

The homes are to die for, but Hempstead's die-hard Halloween aficionados also dress to astonish and scare the bejabbers out of youngsters brave enough to roam haunted Hempstead.

Emily Sampson, the 16-year-old daughter of Steve and Sheri Sampson, said her father dresses up and "follows people around the neighborhood." An eerie clown mask and black cloak was her father's standard costume, Emily said, but last year he scared children by dressing up as a spooky old man.

"It's not too scary, but sometimes it still even frightens me," Emily said. Sampson's shenanigans may be too over-the-top for very young children, she said--they have been known to cry from fright.

Last year, more than 1,200 children wandered through the neighborhood, Barmasse said. Neighbors keep count so they'll have enough candy on hand to appease the masses, she said.

Barmasse said Halloween is among her favorite holidays because of the tradition formed with her neighbors and the camaraderie they share. "You can count on seeing so many of your friends and neighbors over the course of the evening," Barmasse said. "The parents will sometimes stop in for awhile while the kids go trick-or-treating, and we all just enjoy the entire evening. People will drive by on the days leading up to Halloween to see how the decorations are progressing."

The homes on Hempstead Street are decorated slowly and deliberately throughout the month of October, but to keep the element of surprise and to thwart stealing, they are not completely gussied up until Halloween night, Barmasse said. "It's like a huge party," she said. "We never even close the door after 6 p.m. or so as the kids keep coming."