A fun & frightful night in Black River

BLACK RIVER, New York (WWNY) - There were plenty of scares to go around in Black River Halloween night.

For Alyson Monaghan and her friends, their heartbeats sped up a bit as they took a leisurely stroll through Bruce Funeral Home, which was transformed into a haunted house.

“Okay, it wasn’t too bad,” Monaghan said. “It could have been worse,” adding that she had a couple of jump scares.

The funeral home has been in Jill Wiley’s family since the 1970s. She purchased it from her father a decade ago.

When she took over, the haunted house was born.

“I think as a parent, everywhere you go you always have to spend money to do something fun and this was just something that I wanted to do to give back to the community here in Black River and the surrounding communities,” Wiley said.

Wiley says with a handful of volunteers, it takes about a week to put it all together, making sure every skeleton and scarer are in the right spot.

How does she recruit her scare team? it’s pretty simple.

“I tell my kids, grab a couple friends and they have a ball doing it and we usually have anywhere from 12 to 17 people in there,” she said.

Wiley says they had a few years to get ready this time around, taking a few Octobers off due to COVID.

But she says it’s like they never stopped.

“Just seeing everybody going in and the kids running through it multiple times, that’s what makes it fun,” she said.

Copyright 2022 WWNY. All rights reserved.