The Grey Phantom & Chavez Nightmare: 2021 Reviews

Norwalk, CA

Happy #ShriekySunday, folks! This month, every day is #ShriekySunday, as we’ve got Halloween coverage overflowing the site. Today, we’re focused on Norwalk, where we visit a couple of home haunts that we discovered last year—separated less than a mile apart! The Grey Phantom and the Chavez Nightmare make for a great one-two combination for haunt enthusiasts, because they provide some fantastic, passionate, home-grown spooks. And with next week’s opening of Realm of Shadow, located in Norwalk this year, haunt fans have a quality triple threat of wonderful, intimate haunts to enjoy as this month nears its close!

It’s a broken record, but Southern California really does have an embarrassment of Halloween riches. In addition to the plethora of commercial haunts all across the region, there are endless home haunts that surprise and astound. Some are quality walk-through mazes, and others are immaculate displays, but all share a common Halloween passion, and it’s great to see how these manifest in their own ways.

The Grey Phantom

This haunt broke onto the scene in a big way with a big splash (see what I did there) last year with a full-on boat facade referencing the World War II alter ego of the Queen Mary, the Grey Phantom. A wonderful tribute to Dark Harbor, The Grey Phantom left visitors awestruck at the scale and scope of this yard display, which also featured some great little vignette “peek-in’s” that contained scenes referencing various mazes or characters from the beloved Long Beach haunted attraction. And given that Dark Harbor went dark last year (then again, so did basically all commercial haunts), The Grey Phantom filled a void for QMDH fans who needed a fix from the spooky ship.

When I spoke to creator Ernie Veloz during my visit last year, he hinted that he had designs for something bigger, aspiring to take this haunt beyond “just” a yard display and transform into into an actual walk-through maze! Well, mission accomplished this year, as The Grey Phantom has made the transition from yard haunt to full home haunt. Guests now can “enter” the ship and explore a few of the spaces that it hides within, navigating a gloomy and water environment where unknown spirits roam.

The Grey Phantom as a maze is not particularly sprawling. The layout takes place entirely on the front yard of the property. But this intimate maze does its best to make full use of the real estate it does have. Guests enter near the bow of the ship, immediately entering an elegant stateroom suite with a real grandfather clock and a spiraling projection on the ground that seems to imply a sort of portal to other realms. Creepy dolls have made themselves at home around the furnishings, making the ambiance a little unnerving.

This year, guests can go “inside,” because the yard display is now also a walk-through haunted maze!

Guests then make their way into a chainlink, boiler room-esque area bathed in red. Reminiscent of similar scenes that have rotated across the ship mazes at Dark Harbor over the years (probably most frequently in B340), it’s a contrasting fiery atmosphere before guest transition quickly to a watery blue in the following room. Here, the Boogeyman that social media advertising for The Grey Phantom has been referencing makes an appearance—a ghoulish and shadowy figure of death prominently featured.

The maze concludes with more murky waters to navigate, with a blue laser field and fog shrouding the space and suggesting the environment from the old Submerged Maze, or perhaps Lullaby. Here too, the old souls of the ship lurk, and you never know where they may be hiding or lingering.

But beware. The Boogeyman dwells within…

The Grey Phantom evokes a nice nostalgia for the Dark Harbor event and was a fun though brief walkthrough. As is often the case for home haunts, it was not quite completely finished, as the facade was missing the lighting that made last year’s display really pop, as well as projection effects both outside and inside the maze and additional channels of audio. Regardless, it was still a great little haunt to explore, and the scareactors inside did a nice job with mild startle scares that would be acceptable enough even for younger children. No doubt it will continue to layer additional detail as each weekend progresses, but it’s already a cool little experience and a touching ode to its inspirational haunt.

The Grey Phantom is located at 14338 Funston Ave, Norwalk, CA 90650 and runs Fridays through Sundays from 7:00 - 10:00 in the evening for the rest of this month. Make a free reservation on Eventbrite to secure a pass onto the ship. Parking is tight on Funston, so you may need to park down the street on on an adjacent block.

The Chavez Nightmare

Last year, I visited the Chavez Nightmare and the Grey Phantom on the last weekend of October. This year, after I finished my time at The Grey Phantom, I wondered if the Chavez Nightmare might be running, because as a yard display last year, it had been operational for most of the month of October. Since the Chavez Nightmare was less than a mile due south of The Grey Phantom, it was a no brainer to at least swing by. And as it turns out, my hunch was rewarded by a fantastic yard display being tweaked for finishing touches by the owner, George Chavez, himself!

This year’s Chavez Nightmare centers around Wendigos.

When I chatted with George last year, he mentioned that his Halloween displays (and mazes, when they were still doing that before COVID) were always a different theme each year. Last year was a multi-theme approach focused on anything that gave people nightmares, from creepy dolls to ravenous scarecrows to towering demon creatures to spooky ghosts.

This year, the Chavez Nightmare is more focused, honing in its display on the mythical wending beast of Native American folklore. The entire front yard is bathed in fiery red and purple, giving an intense feel to the environment, which perfectly fits the feral horror of the wendigo. On the right side, a tower wendigo stretches up over a skeletal victim that has been ravaged by the beast’s savagery. Next to it, a lone wolf howls in front of a crimson moon, with a set of deformed jack-o-lanterns stretching in front of the wolf. And to the left, more wendigos crouch, coiled to attack, almost prowling for their next victim. There’s even an animatronic creature among them that leaps out if approached too closely! Cheesecloth cobwebs adorn the columns forming the entrance arch of the house, and flickering flame bulbs create a nice accenting pop of orange along the front.

The crimson atmosphere casts an intense sight!

What’s really great about the Chavez Nightmare is how creatively simple George is with his home-made props, figures, and decorations. The skeletal wendigos coiled at the ground are nothing more than 2x3 lumber pieces screwed together into a rough shape of a beast, then draped and wrapped in sheets of gauze and accented by store-bought beastly skulls and boney appendage props. This might be noticeable during the day, but at night and under show lighting, one would hardly realize how basic the wendigo figures were without taking a closer and more scrutinizing look!

Other details add charm and strengthen the atmosphere of this haunted yard display. The full moon is just a sheet of plywood cut in a circle and cast with a red lighting projection. A haunting audio loop of supposedly real wendigos plays from a speaker tucked behind the tree, crooning the sorrowful and unnerving howls of the mythical beast on repeat. There’s even an eye over the “zero” of the Chavez house address. Little things like this add to the richness and cleverness of the haunt.

George mentioned that growing up in Long Beach, there was always one house that was really decked out for Halloween and evoked that ardent Halloween spirit with its decorations and trick-or-treating destination. That is the type of sentiment that George wants to provide for his neighbors, and it’s worked, because he’s gotten teenagers coming on Halloween how have thanked him for having such a memorable effect on them when they were elementary school aged. Essentially, now George Chavez’s house is the cool house that everyone locally remembers for Halloween. Beyond anything else, that stirring of emotions is why George creatively assembles a different theme each Halloween season. His passion and his care for the holiday and for crafting lasting impressions of passers-by and guests are very clear, and it’s so wonderful that he repeatedly seeks to relay his own Halloween love and fervor to others.

The Chavez Nightmare is located at 12038 Hopland St, Norwalk, CA 90650 and runs all throughout October, from about 6:30 - 10:30pm nightly. It’s located right across the street from the south side of Edmondson Elementary School. Parking here seems to be much less challenging than over at The Grey Phantom, despite the less than one mile separation between the two.

That does it for today’s jaunt. We’ve got more reviews this upcoming week, including from haunts new and old. Only two more weeks remain before Halloween. Make them count, folks!