JACKSON – Among the many well decorated homes dressed up for Halloween, there is one that stands out. At this house, along with picking up a treat, you leave a donation of food for the needy.
Enter if you dare, Jackson’s House of Horror operated by the Domenick family. The lord of the manor is Jeff Domenick who is carrying on the tradition of horrific fun for not only his neighborhood, but for the community at large. Appropriately enough, the focus of fun is a house on Bittersweet Drive which clearly sounds like a location fit for a horror film.
“My in-laws did this for 25-plus years in their neighborhood in Jackson and we always ‘worked’ the trail on Halloween. Once my wife Jaymi and I started having a family of our own, we bought our house on Bittersweet Drive about 13 years ago,” Jeff Domenick said.
He added, “when the kids were little, we would take them trick-or-treating around our neighborhood, which was always a ‘hot spot’ for kids. Parents would drive to our neighborhood, park and trick-or-treat through our streets. We have a great neighborhood, filled with lots of houses and quite a bit of us even have golf carts that we drive around…. very different from when we were kids… we walked everywhere!”
“One of my neighbors hooked up a trailer to his golf cart and hosted hayrides as the kids went house to house, hopping on and off as they ran to ring the doorbells. As the years went by, my in-laws’ neighborhood had less and less kids so my in-laws, Ed and Susan, slowly started to bring their Halloween decorations and ideas to our house to add to our decorations and a new tradition began,” Domenick added.
The family started building the trail about 10 years ago and continued to make it longer and longer, filled with more and more spooky and creepy things, year after year. “Graveyards, big blow-ups, skeletons, ghosts, spiders and just about all things you would expect to see on a haunted walk through. About five or six years ago we decided to extend the trail to go from the front yard to the backyard and add a 30-foot tunnel that was filled with smoke and strobe lights,” he said.
“It became the ‘’piece de resistance.’ Between the scary sounds, haunted music, screams and random scary people that ‘work’ the trail, it makes for a really different way to get your treat… if you make it all the way through the haunted trail… There will be someone or something there to greet you and give you your treat,” Domenick added
He added that “it’s nice to see the neighborhood kids grow through the years and still stop by as they get older. It’s a nice memory that they will always have of the neighborhood and it’s something that we hope to continue for many years. My father in-law told me a story, that one year a neighbor brought her fiancé back to my in-law’s house, just to show him how cool her Halloween was, when she was a kid. He said to me, ‘That’s why we do it, now it’s your turn to give the kids a great memory.’”
A new element has been added to the horror house. “We now host a food drive to support the Jackson Food Pantry. We set up a table at the end of the driveway on Halloween and collect non-perishables/toiletries,” he added.
Domenick said, “anything we can do to give back to the community. Some people just stop by to drop off canned goods. We have a great neighborhood in a great town.”
The event finally has a name. “We named it after all these years – “The Domenicks’ Annual Night of Terror – Let’s Scare Hunger.”
Photo courtesy Jeff Domenick 
A ghostly neon figure dances in front of the Bittersweet Drive residence. (Photo courtesy Jeff Domenick)
