From the outside looking in, it hardly looks like a haunted house.
Passageways snake into and around a 16,000-square-foot portion of the former Acme-Click store off Manchester Road in South Akron.
The endless series of hallways and small rooms are covered by thousands and thousands of sheets of boring, unpainted fire retardant plywood.
But for David Barton, this is a giant blank canvas with his mind conjuring up scary vision after scary vision.
Barton darts around the space, taking a visitor on a tour that for now just exists inside of his head.
Imagine a giant, eerie, living industrial machine taking up one wall near the eventual main entrance, which was once a place where grocery shoppers peered into meat cases.
Don’t fret, shoppers: In another room not far away is a ginormous rubber severed pig head along with equally obnoxiously large fake carved sides of pigs and cattle.
Barton carefully navigates past the spooky remnants of walls from a failed indoor miniature golf attraction, neatly stacked like giant building blocks.
He points to a nearby Egyptian sarcophagus, saying it could be the walls of a crypt or something equally cool.
The challenge for Barton and his creative and financial partners has been to transform this nightmarish dream into a real spooky business.
A bit of bad luck
Thirteen.
Yes, Barton shakes his head in disbelief that it has been 13-odd years since he moved the first zombie body and piece of rickety furniture into the former store space in hopes of opening a haunted attraction.
He explains it has been a series of unfortunate events: Investors have come and gone over the years, creative partners found other ventures, life circumstances have gotten in the way and then the real scary part — meeting building code rules and regulations.
Barton said the city has been great over the years, but whenever you are building something the least bit out of the ordinary, it can get complicated.
“For the lack of a better word, it’s been a bit of bad luck,” he said.
So far, an estimated $400,000 has been sunk into the project, from the nearly completed walk-through attic scene to the front of an old-school Chevy van parked in the middle of the haunt to the actual autopsy table from a hospital in Zanesville.
Barton said he doesn’t like to think about the money spent and revenue lost each Halloween while the haunt remained shuttered and about 75 percent finished.
There was a push to try to open at least half of the attraction — now dubbed the Ghoul Brothers — this year.
But Barton said, as ironic as it might sound given the passage of some 13 years, he didn’t want to rush and open something subpar.
A love of scary things
The 1984 Springfield High School graduate’s love of all things scary and “getting things just right” was born as a kid inside one of the best haunted attractions ever — the Haunted Mansion at Disney World.
This led to backyard efforts with buddies like Bill Morrison, who helped craft some of the scary stuff inside Akron’s wildly popular Haunted Schoolhouse and Haunted Laboratory, and an eventual gig to help redo the Barber Haunt on the O.C. Barber estate.
“Haunts were whatever we could cobble together back then,” he said. “Things were not as sophisticated as they are now.”
Barton even did makeup on the classic Akron-centric, low-budget horror flick The Dead Next Door.
A stint in Hollywood
This love for all things monsters led him to move to Hollywood in 1987 to pursue a career as a makeup artist and set designer. His best-known gig was creating some of the costumes and monsters for the Power Rangers.
He moved back to the Akron area in 1999 and just four years later started the effort to build the haunt in the back area of the former grocery store — the front is now home to several businesses, including a Subway.
Some reminders of his Hollywood days are scattered amid piles of furniture and other odds and ends, what Barton calls “haunted house gold.”
There’s a rubber creature from the forgettable movie DeepStar Six. Morrison says the movie was “terrible” and the plot line unbelievable.
Barton grumbles back that some of the effects were pretty cool, pointing to his creation.
And there’s a fully nude, anatomically correct rubber dude from MTV’s comedy show Death Valley.
Looking over the naked man even quiets the usually chatty Morrison, who is quick with a quip or two or three.
“Yeah, we’ll have to figure out how we will cover that part up,” Barton said.
A labor of love
Morrison, who is part of the creative team, said he is ready to stop cutting “boring” wood and start carving out scary creatures to call the Ghoul Brothers haunted attraction home.
“We are trying to build something here that we would like to walk through,” he said. “It is not about the cheap scare of someone just jumping out at you. A chihuahua can do that. This will be all about the sensory overload.”
And this just may be a small part of the reason the project is now in Year 13.
Barton said the ultimate goal is for guests to walk through the personal eclectic collection of the fictional Ghoul Brothers.
“Think of it like a horror version of a Ripley’s museum,” he said. “It’s like the things they collected have all come to life.”
Barton said he has literally put his “blood, sweat and tears” into the project and looks forward to opening the doors to guests on Sept. 29, 2017.
“We might only get one shot at this, so we want it to be the best it can possibly be,” he said. “This has been a labor of love. I love monsters, and I love doing horror makeup.
“This will be as close to Hollywood as you can get in Akron.”
Craig Webb can be reached at cwebb@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3547.