Arlington Community Haunted House shuts down after denied permit

A haunted hotspot in Arlington had to close its doors this year to the disappointment of many ghosts and goblins. Arlington Community Haunted House was run by a local family and an army of volunteers every Halloween. Fox 13's Jennifer Dowling shows us how the founding family made sure the tradition will carry on elsewhere. This skull is one of the last remaining props at the Arlington Community Haunted House. It's been in operation for around a decade and its closure has left the community without its Halloween scares. If this year's Arlington Community Haunted House had opened October 1st as planned, visitors would have been on the run from a troupe of radioactive clowns. The story was the circus set up too close to a nuclear reactor that melted down. Behold the graveyard to the Arlington Community Haunted House. Jackie Murray and her dad Brian have been serving up scares in their yard since 2015. It's a family thing originally. We paused during COVID and then we came back in 2022 and it became a monster from there. It just continued to grow. With the help of volunteers, this build of this year's haunted maze was nearly complete. We were about 85% done. Then she says local code enforcement sent a chilling email. It was a notice that we were denied our permit. The family met with officials and realized building and fire codes had changed. If you're an amusement structure, you have to now adhere to building codes. Unable to afford the updates- It was really tough, I tried to be strong. Jackie made a heart wrenching decision. I walked out to my car and I went on a drive and I cried cuz I knew that I had to tell all of my volunteers. It was time to bury the longstanding tradition. And this is all the stuff that doesn't pass code and so we're just getting ready to take it all to the dump. But Jackie didn't wanna let the spirit of the place completely die out. She called terror for a cause, Stanwood's haunted experience to donate all the scary stuff that makes a haunted house a home. A lot of our props got adopted by them. And while the monsters may have moved on to another community, the memories will live on here in Arlington. We ended up meeting a lot of people we never knew before. So in that sense, it's great. Got a lot of great memories. So we have that. It wasn't really ever about a haunted house. It was about bringing people together. If you'd like to reminisce and see some of the former props from this haunted house, you can head over to the Haunted Experience in Stanwood at the Fairgrounds. It's only about a 20-minute drive from here. Reporting from Arlington, Jennifer Dowling, FOX 13 News.