SANTA CLARA, Utah — When Halloween comes to the landlubber town of Santa Clara in southern Utah, pirates arrive.
A Santa Clara resident’s dream to bring some haunted fun to southern Utah is in its 10th year. A pirate ship sits on a residential street complete with firing cannons and audio animatronics inspired by Disneyland. And it’s free.
“I do it for the smiles,” said Todd Wood, who plans his haunted pirate ship display over a year and spends just about every weekend from July to the fall setting it up. “A lot of people need to smile more right now. And I have an opportunity to do that.”
The reward are the reaction of Santa Clara residents like Megan Ahleen and her husband Zach, who have passed by many times over the years but not stopped to take a peek inside. Now with a two-year-old, they couldn't resist.
“It’s shocking,” Megan said. “They blew it out of the water.”
Here in the middle of a Gubler Drive block, the dead men do tell tales at The Pirates of Haunted Cove. Wood never worked for Disney but has engineered airplanes for a living.
“The whole point of doing this was to bring something to the people in the community, and because I didn't have that when I was a kid and I've always wanted to do that.”
Wood and his high school sweetheart wife Shari have lived in Santa Clara for 14 years after growing up in Los Angeles., then moving to Las Vegas. This is the first year for the fifth version of Wood’s ship that draws large crowds from October 1 until Halloween. And people are left with questions.
“We were walking through and going, ‘Man, did they use a crane? Like what? How?’” said Z Dickson, a student at nearby Utah Tech University from Fort Worth, Texas.
Wood’s answer?
“This year we started in June, and we got the ship up in August in the front yard,” he said. “Once you get the ship in place, decorating is you just pile on the decorations and wire this up and wire that up and it becomes a lot easier.”
Natalie Lawrence, a Haunted Pirates patron from St. George asked, “I want to know what do they do with it when it's not Halloween?”
“:I have a shipping container in the backyard, and I have a basketball court in the backyard,” Wood said. “I don't know what basketball is for, so I use it to store stuff.”
There aren’t cardboard cutouts. These are moving figures with “how did they do that” special effects. Wood says he doesn’t know how much it all costs.
“I have no idea,” Wood said. “Some things are out there that I bought 12 years ago. So I have no idea what it's worth today. And a lot of it is labor,” said Wood, who does still take donations and uses the surplus to donate himself to local pet rescue groups. “I don't really care about the price. If I can buy it, if I can afford it, if I can build it, it goes in the yard.”
Some people don’t care how much it cost.
“I love that there was this boned octopus that I really liked,” said six-year-old Logan Lawrence.
Wood said he tries to avoid using bloody imagery and keeps it family-friendly. There are treats, but not many tricks.
“ I don't like it when Halloween pukes on your front lawn,” Wood said. “I like to make sure that everything has a theme. Everything has a reason to be there. And if it doesn't, it doesn't come out. I still have a backyard full of stuff that we didn't use this year because I didn't need it. It wasn't part of the theme.”.
And this year, when people enter the pirate ship, they’re either underwater or on a barbary coast. “You walk in through the town of Torturga as the town deteriorates into a shipwreck underwater,
mermaids and fish and smoke and laser swamps.”
When the sun rises on Nov.1 , the anchors will be raised up and the pirates will begin to depart Haunted Wood Cove. But just as it took a while to dock the ship in port, the bon voyage will take a bit.
“I think we'll be completely finished with it maybe the week before Christmas,” Wood said. “This is like a six-month affair.”
