Copyright Los Angeles Times
Jesus “Chewie” Garcia wasn’t really into scary movies while he was growing up. But when the 32-year-old Santa Ana resident was 18, he became interested in haunted attractions. At that time, he started looking for one to visit around early August. “There was one open, and it so happens to be at the GardenWalk,” Garcia recalled. It was called The Empty Grave and was open early for the Halloween season. Garcia said he enjoyed the attraction so much, he went through it four or five times. “The next day I brought my sister and my mom chickened out in the first room,” he said, but he was hooked by the experience. “I asked them for a job.” It has been a full-circle moment for Garcia, who opened his new year-round haunted attraction, Eulogy Collective, at the Anaheim GardenWalk Oct. 10. The current theme of the seven-room attraction is “Deadly Sins,” which takes guests through detailed sets and live characters depicting pride, envy, lust, greed, wrath, gluttony and sloth. “It’s a lot more emotional to me,” he said of the enterprise. “The GardenWalk, they know my story that … I started here, like this is my stomping ground.” The attraction also houses a storefront with horror-themed collectibles, purses, decor and more available for purchase. Eulogy Collective is open various nights through early November starting at 6 p.m. with general admission tickets available on their website, eulogycollective.com, for $24. The plan is for the attraction to close in late November and then reopen in December for a Christmas-themed overlay. Garcia said the attraction may also open for other holidays like Valentine’s Day and Easter — with an overarching horror theme, of course. “We’re already thinking of the next things to do, you know, how to improve the haunt here,” Garcia said. “We’re already planning December since we’re year-round. … February is in the plans already.” Prior to opening Eulogy Collective, Garcia was building his reputation in local haunted attractions through Santa Ana Haunt, which he started in 2020 at his father’s home in Santa Ana. “I had lost my grandpa — that was like the biggest loss I’ve ever had,” Garcia said. “I was just kind of in a dark place and there was nothing going on. Halloween has always been a big thing for us.” He texted some friends and crew from other haunted attractions where he’d previously worked about putting together a small display. “We’ll scare in the front yard, like keep our distance, wear a mask under our mask,” he said of the pandemic-era debut. “We’ll just do a little display for the neighborhood. They’re like, ‘Yeah, sure, let’s do it.’” Garcia slapped together a shirt that said “Santa Ana Haunt” with a phone app and scored some building panels from another haunted attraction that was relocating. “So our little display went from like a display to a haunt,” he said. “Guys were on stilts to avoid being close to people and, man, everybody loved it. We were like the only little Halloween thing going on in 2020, at least in our area. We were spraying people’s hands with sanitizer in the front yard, we were drawing chalk lines on the ground and we had like 2,000 people come that year.” It kept growing from there. Garcia went on OfferUp and Craigslist and started buying supplies and Halloween decorations for pennies. “I’d show up to people’s houses, where I’m buying a 10- or 15-dollar piece, and they’d offer me their whole garage full of stuff for $200,” he recalled. Last year, Santa Ana Haunt partnered with local attraction OC Nightmare to create a vampire-themed maze for the Halloween season at the GardenWalk. John Hsu, chief executive of Anaheim GardenWalk, said one of the things the venue values is culture and the arts. “We welcome any kind of very genuine and very original ideas … so that way people can come here to always find something that’s really unique.” He said Garcia and his team are very talented and last year’s attraction at the GardenWalk was very well received. “They want to be one-of-a-kind, they want to go above and beyond,” Hsu said. “They really spend a lot of manpower, resources, and we also invested a lot of our resources into this, wanting to make this one of the best in the area. … We’re building something that’s Disney quality and something that people will treasure.” Garcia said this all happened because he fell in love with what he calls “the art of the scare” all those years ago. In that time, he’s built a team of friends — along with his family — who’ve come along to help and work whenever needed. His oldest daughter, 15, actually scares in one of Eulogy Collective’s rooms. And he attributes many ideas, including the “Deadly Sins” theme to his wife, Melissa Diaz. He said ideas are often a process and they change and develop as he and the team work through them.
