Veronica A. Rangel

Forty five years ago, my mom, Sheila Starr, with a group of her creative friends and her technically-savvy husband, created one of the very first home haunts - way before Halloween became the huge holiday we celebrate today. Everything was created by hand back then, because it just wasn’t available to buy.

For 15 years, Starr’s “Ghosty House” grew every year - delighting its visitorswith a haunted, tombstone-filled graveyard and 15 minute shows of Doctor Frankenstein experimenting on his monster in an all-too-real scientific lab. Sounds of cats would scream, chains clanked, and doors creaked while witches gave out candy out of a monstrous cauldron, Dracula rose from his coffin, anda chainsaw-wielding zombie would creep out of the ever present fog, readyto scare.

Eventually, my mom got older and gates went up in her community, so she sunsetted her Ghosty House experience, although remnants remained, like her monstrous cauldron in her front lawn, which was actually a 150 year old Wells Fargo gold smelt.

Toward the end of its run, my mom wrote a children’s book about her Ghosty House, telling the story of a little girl who visits the spookiest house in her neighborhood on Halloween night. Since I was a graphic designer, she asked me to illustrate it. We worked out a storyboard and mockup, and I illustrated a few of the spreads. Then we presented it to every publisher we could find, but it wasn’t “discovered” in the mountain of manuscripts they received daily.

We put our dreams of publishing Ghosty House aside, and life went on. The years went by, and once in a while, the mockup of Ghosty House would resurface. I would read it and smile, and remember how much fun those days were - creating an experience that everyone could enjoy, with a lot of creativity and little bit of scary.

My mom passed away 7 years ago, and recently, the Ghosty House mockup turned up again, but this time, I saw it with fresh eyes. I now have three grown up children, the third being a curly haired girl named Annie who loved her grandmother and got to witness the beautiful, creative spark in the universe that was my mom. Annie would not be born for 15 years after we created the mockup, but when I saw it again, all I saw was my daughter, Annie, in the pages of my mom’s story - same curly hair, same spunky attitude.

I realized that I could now make the dream of publishing my mom’s book a reality, thanks to modern technology. Publishing Ghosty House and my mom’s legacy has come full circle, and it means the world to me. Enjoy!