Scaring up some loot for charity
By LEE PROCIDA
Cherry Hill Sun
11/8/2007

Second-annual Kassan Haunted Garage a frighteningly good way to teach a valuable life lesson

The truly tenacious trick-or-treater wastes as little time at an individual house as necessary. When maximizing candy intake is a top priority, getting from one door to the next as fast as possible is a necessity.

And when the weights of pillowcases are compared at the end of the night, only the best houses are remembered, everything else a sugar-fueled blur. It takes a really special house to be remembered a week after Halloween, when costumes are stored away and digested candy has stored itself as fat around the waste of the tenacious trick-or-treater.

In Fox Hollow, the Kassan house on Partridge Lane is one of those special houses. This is a house where trick-or-treaters formed a line waiting out front, where cars lined the street, and, in a bizarre but intriguing twist on the typical procedure of the holiday, visitors were giving something back rather than taking what they could get.

If you had visited, you would have been greeted by Jigsaw, the maniacal rosy-cheeked doll from the movie Saw, otherwise known as 13-year-old Beck Middle School student Alec Kassan, who would have welcomed you to his second annual Haunted Garage.

Before leading you in, he would have told you the Haunted Garage is intended to raise money for UNICEF. He would tell you his mother Carole, dressed as a scary doctor, scary in the fake blood sense, not the out-of-network sense, helped raise money for the same cause as a child and encourages her sons to do the same.

You would have then followed him inside through a cloud of fog, surrounded by mysterious and creepy sounds. He would have lead you past “The Ring”-like static filled TV, past a floating ghost, to a large antique mirror sitting on the ground.

Jigsaw would have told you not to look at the mirror too long, but you would have anyway. You would have stared at your reflection for a few seconds, wondering what would happen, until two hands, belonging to Alec’s friend Najeeb Jones, banged on the window near to you, causing you to jump.

Then you would have scampered after your host, past a fake gorilla sitting in a dark corner, where a car would be parked on an un-haunted day. You would shortly find the gorilla, a.k.a 13-year-old Ricky Tang, was merely sleeping and was angry you woke him.

You would have screamed and avoided the ornery ape by continuing forward to see a massive spider’s lair, where a bald severed head was all that was left of the arachnid’s last meal. Your mild disgust would have turned to shrieking surprise as the head jumped out at you, courtesy of Alec’s dad Larry Kassan, chief Haunted Garage engineer and co-designer with Alec and his friends.

By now, you would have thought why you followed a doll known from movies based on torturing people, but you would continue forward to see a cage full of hands. You would have wondered why someone would keep detached hands in a cage, until one, owned by Tarek Abdelkader, jumped at you.

With this last fright, you would have had it, and you would have tried to hurry through the fog out the way you came in. This would have been right before the demonized girl from “The Exorcist” popped out, the handiwork of Luke Kassan, Alec’s 9-year-old brother, sending you screaming out the entrance.

“I would say it’s an eight-and-a-half,” Alec, who is no longer Jigsaw, said, grading the Haunted Garage on a 10-point scariness scale.

Carole Kassan, also no longer scary, said the kids terrified $176.47 in donations out of people during the two nights – Oct. 30 and 31 – the garage was haunted.

She said this was better than last year, since then it was the first time and people didn’t bring money with them trick-or-treating. This year, people were asking about it days beforehand.

Carole said she expects Larry and the kids will have even more success next year.

“I think it is great for the kids to be working on this with Larry,” she said. “It’s a great experience.

“I want them to see (donating to charity) is what it should be about.”

The Kassan’s doubled the size of their haunted area this year and simplified it, making what used to be a zigzagged route a circular path. They estimate 150 people came last year, which they easily exceeded this year.

They also said with how popular the garage was this year, they will probably need a permit to do it next year. They expect the town’s trick-or-treaters to mark their house as a required stop next year.