Blood curdling screams disseminate down the block as you follow a skull-lined pathway into a mysterious fort. In it, bloodied asylum patients wail in agony, while killer clowns and murderous hillbillies corner you in their lairs, and severed doll heads stitched up and hung from the ceiling meet you face-to-face at every turn…

A 19 year long Cherry Hill tradition resides in this home of horrors: the Dubois Family Haunted House.

For nearly two decades, Brian DuBois has initiated his Halloween festivities on August 1st, when he begins to craft an elaborate themed haunted house in his backyard. It consists of several different rooms, all decorated to fit an annual theme-from fairy tales, zombie break, board games, broadway musicals, phobias, portals, and urban legends, to this year’s-“An Assault on Your Senses”. Additionally, the family offers three scare levels, cementing the DuBois Haunted House as a must-visit during Halloween for people of all ages.

“I said to my wife, like, I want a greasy rope… so we made a 60 foot greasy rope,” DuBois said regarding the construction of this year’s attraction. “We made sure that everything felt greasy and weird and smelled bad and that you were getting wind in your face and tripping over things.”

The DuBois family began their backyard haunted house because there was simply nothing to do in the neighborhood for Halloween. After having children, Brian DuBois realized that everything was either too expensive or time-consuming, thus he decided that he could do better. Since then, the family has utilized the entire year to brainstorm new, innovative ideas, and annually spends nearly three months building non-stop.

“I challenge myself to build and create something different and new. Each time it’s a different floor plan; if it’s the same… I’ll get bored,” DuBois said.

Having started out as a small porch display, the event has since grown immensely to an approximate 10 room structure in the home’s backyard.

“There was a two hour wait all night and the streets were clogged. It’s too big for a residential house anymore,” DuBois said, regarding this Halloween weekend’s success.
From a “No Scare” level, where actors wave and smile as you tour the display, to “Full Scare”, where actors jump out at you, to what DuBois calls “Code Brown”, where actors jump out and grab your arms and legs, the family tries to create something for everyone.

“Everyone gets freaked out by different things so we just try to hit as many things as possible,” said DuBois. “There’s lots of different ways to scare; it’s not always a jump scare.”

This year’s layout encapsulated this idea, as a combination of tight twists and turns for those with claustrophobia, dark, wet corridors for those afraid of the dark, and hyper-decorated rooms filled with dolls, blood, and organs guaranteed that your heart would skip a beat. On top of this, DuBois made sure to trigger the eyes, hands, ears, and noses of his guests to fit with the theme, “An Assault on Your Senses”.

“[In] one room, there’s an air wick, and the scent I bought was ‘dumpster fire’… The clowns are wearing popcorn scented cologne, [and] the fog machine in the hillbilly shack spits out a swamp mildew smell,” said DuBois.

Unfortunately, the DuBois Family Haunted House celebrated its penultimate year this October with its final scares to be had in 2024. Though the process of constructing the attraction is costly and time consuming, the family finds a great amount of joy into making Halloween more memorable, and will cherish their two decades spent dispersing both happiness and fright to those in the community.