The Haunt on Eden Brings Screams All October-long
Halloween season is here, which means that every weekend in October, the cast and crew of the Haunt on Eden are busy scaring visitors from across the state.
It was 2013 when Susan Donis came home from work one day to find her husband Jeff building a haunted house on their Eden Street property. Initially, she laughed it off, but by the time Halloween rolled around, she was on board with making the small haunt work.
“We had a couple people. It was one of those things where everybody would get ready inside because it was freezing, and I would be like, “Guys, there's a car!,” and we'd all run out the back door and enter the haunt from the back to do our little four-minute thing,” said Donis. “We look back on that and we crack up because it was such meager beginnings. It was just for free, and just for fun.”
Those humble beginnings now lie far in the past. Every year, new features got added, from a moat with a rowboat to actors in advanced makeup and costumes. The audiences grew, and soon the haunted house was too big to manage at home. In 2018, they moved the event to the Mount Southington property while keeping the ‘Haunt on Eden’ name.
“We opened here in 2018,” said Donis. “It was very small, very short. We would time it for four minutes, it was so small. But over the years, we've created this crazy thing that we never really foresaw.”
For the past eight years, Donis, her husband, and their two daughters have created the “house,” or set, from scratch. It features a maze of interconnected spooky settings, including an asylum, haunted dollhouse and circus. The set grows every year, and new things are constantly being added. New additions in 2026 include a firepit seating area and a gift shop with items from local artisans.
“I've seen it grow,” said actor Draven Dabrowski. “It used to be like a small maze, like Legos almost. They used to build it up and take it down, and it was smaller than this.”
Actors roam the scenes with homemade props, makeup and elaborate costumes. Makeup artists craft the actors’ looks using a mix of commercial and stage makeup, and the cast creates intricate backstories for their characters.
The Haunt on Eden prides itself on not using advanced special effects to create scares, instead relying on real humans to do the acting and bring out authentic screams.
Each year, thousands visit during the Halloween season. Donis does not keep an exact count of the numbers, but tickets are limited and sell fast. The team wants to make sure that the visitors do not wait too long for their experiences and the venue does not become too crowded. It is a group effort to make sure everything runs smoothly.
“We have almost 40 actors. We've got parking and ticket people, and a couple of people that help to manage it,” said Donis, “making sure the flow of the haunt is good. They make sure that we're not taking too long, that we're moving people through, but not letting the groups catch up to each other. That's a very big thing for us because it's not fun when all of a sudden you have ten other people behind you; then nobody's getting the scare.”
Behind the scenes, the large cast and crew foster a family atmosphere wildly different from that in the scenes they portray. Many of the actors and makeup artists are young, some in college or high school, and they have become friends outside of the Haunt.
Working together each night to scare people has brought them closer, which, according to Dabrowski, is the best part. The second best part? The screams his clown costume elicits.
“All the actors here are like family almost. Like today, we're having a potluck. Everybody's bringing food every day. Everybody's always willing to help. Even the new ones that come in. The second best part is scaring people. I've scared people like twice my size,” said Dabrowski, who is now a student at Southern Connecticut State University, and started at the Haunt on Eden as a teenager.
The Outsider can verify that the scenes and props in the Haunt are pretty scary. Photography is prohibited inside the scenes, but visitors do not have time to take pictures when they are being chased by a killer clown or spooked by a zombie.
While not everyone will be scared, Donis says that the Haunt on Eden really has a different aim. It is about having fun.
“For us, it's all about the visitor. Everything we do is based on: what is the guest going to think? What are they going to feel? Are they going to like it? That's really what it comes down to for us. We just want everybody to have fun. I mean, you can't scare everybody,” said Donis. “We have people come out laughing, clapping, running for their lives, all sorts of different reactions. But fun is the biggest thing for us, and scary is second biggest.”
