10 Haunted House Ideas to Make Your Home Extra Spooky This Halloween

HALLOWEEN IS serious business in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., and adjacent Tarrytown. But nobody there embraces the area’s holiday heritage with more fervor than Arthur Klock. “Some people go pretty hard on their houses,” said Mr. Klock, “but not to the extent that I do. I’m definitely the crazy person in town.”

Starting in August, the veterinarian begins constructing the frights at his home on Irving Avenue (named for Washington Irving, Tarrytown’s most famous resident and the author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”). Every year, Mr. Klock erects a 14-by-20-foot tent in his driveway to function as a compact, but full-fledged haunted house. This year, he’s styling the tent as the laboratory of “Regenerwrong” (a play on the maker of an antibody treatment used for Covid-19). In his fictional back story, the lab’s mission was to create a real-life Spider-Man, but, as he explains, “It’s a bad laboratory. Things have gone wrong.” Workers bitten by the lab’s experimental arachnids become half-human, half-spider radioactive zombie mutants.