Inside the Colorado haunted house of an award-winning thriller writer

ERIE

A creative knack for the creepy has propelled Carter Wilson to success as an author of 11 complex and compelling psychological thrillers. That same skill has also made his house, a green-and-purple Victorian with white trim, a destination for hundreds of kids and their parents, who — much like the fans of his novels — seek a tense buildup punctuated by a shocking plot twist.

It all happens within minutes on Halloween night, as screams segue to the sweet denouement of candy plopped into a bag.

“You always have that memory of trick or treating at that one house, right?” Wilson says, standing in the garage that he annually relishes transforming into a gauntlet of horror. “That one house that does something — and it doesn’t even have to be much — but they stand out. I always remember thinking that was cool, and I wanted to be that person someday.”

At 56, Wilson achieved a career breakthrough with last year’s “Tell Me What You Did” gaining the literary traction to launch him into the realm of fulltime author — after years of balancing his love for writing with a corporate job in the hospitality industry. But an appreciation for the unnerving and unsettling remains a through line in his life, from his childhood shagging candy in costume, to a haunting experience from his college days, to his development as a practitioner of thrillers that have won five Colorado Book Awards.

And, of course, to the creative instincts that kick in every fall as he plots his next spooky scenario.

Art and stagecraft sometimes intersect. With a writer’s sensibilities, he does tend to construct his displays with an eye for story. And just as an author considers audience, Wilson dedicates his Halloween efforts to the people he most wants to impress. And it’s not just the kids. 

“I design it for their parents because the parents are the ones who appreciate it,” he says. “Although, sometimes you get the really analytical kids who are like, ‘Oh, this is better than last year.’ They really like deconstructing it. But the best are the parents. The best is when the kids are screaming and the parents are like, ‘Dude, this is awesome.’ I do it for those comments.” 

He does it, too, with a finger on the pulse of popular culture. When “Walking Dead” was huge, he went all in on zombies. When “Stranger Things” landed, he constructed an entire underworld in his garage. 

“I just think about what’s the main thing people are going to look at,” he says, “and what’s the story behind it.” 

One year he employed devilish mannequins in ’70s regalia behind “a bar from hell,” while speakers piped in the infectious beat of “Disco Inferno,” beneath a mirror ball. The “Stranger Things” installation, which included the show’s Upside Down wormhole connecting a small Indiana town with another dimension, featured a leaping Demogorgon monster. Those two rank among his personal favorites — not necessarily for fear factor, but for pure production value.

Wilson used to stage his frightfest on the front porch, but eventually moved it into his garage to take advantage of more space. Once he has draped it with black burlap, he has the metaphorical blank page on which he can compose, for instance, the narrative of a haunted upstairs attic: Fog swirling amid furniture draped with white sheets. A mannequin of a young girl singing creepy songs. A baby doll springing from the shadows to provide the jumpscare.

The vibe is the thing. He doesn’t do gore.

“When I did ‘The Walking Dead,’ there were some zombies and body parts,” he allows, “but normally it’s just this kind of a thing.”

On average, Wilson estimates, he spends up to $1,000 and multiple weekends channeling his creepy creativity into scenarios that, except for a few mechanical components, he’ll probably never use again. It’s a point of honor. Eventually, most of his once-used props are given away through the online marketplace.

“The main thing is getting all the infrastructure up,” he says. “I mean, it’s not the Taj Mahal I’m building here. It’s just sheets and stuff like that. The key is that once you black out everything and once you turn on the lighting and the fog machine, then anything looks cool, right?”

Sometimes his imagination outruns his means. Last year, on the 50th anniversary of the movie “Jaws,” he envisioned building a dock on the garage floor, somehow surrounding it with water.

“And then I start thinking, ‘How the hell am I going to have time to do this?’” he says. “So I get some ideas that are bigger than my budget and my capabilities.” 

Wilson bemoans the fact that this year, early October found him exhausted. His latest literary thriller, “When They Find Me,” hits bookstores Nov. 10, and he’s been traveling to promote it and also to tend to other business interests, his speaking engagements, instructional writing workshops and producing a regular podcast. 

Meanwhile, he worked on his next book, now in its first round of edits, and started on yet another that won’t publish until at least 2028. So in addition to fatigue, Wilson is in the throes of something he calls “creative whiplash.” While doing interviews for “When They Find Me,” he has to keep reminding himself what it’s about. (Thriller fans can get a taste, plus hear more from Wilson, in the Nov. 8 edition of SunLit.)

The craziness of his schedule put him behind on planning this season’s Halloween scenario. Rather than entertain higher-concept projects, he set his sights on something basic. 

“So this year,” he says, “I’m doing spiders.”

An early ghost story

While Wilson has always had an affinity for the spooky fun of Halloween, he does share a real-life ghost story that shook him as a college student in upstate New York. For one semester, he and a roommate shared half of a two-story, century-old house that sat at the bottom of a hill.

“The hill,” he recalls, “was a graveyard.”

When things started happening — “nothing crazy, but weird, like the TV would turn on by itself” — they would joke about living in a haunted house. But then one afternoon Wilson came back from classes, laid down on his bed and shut his eyes for a few minutes, resting but not sleeping. That’s when things started to get crazy.

He heard a woman’s voice speaking to him, clearly but at the same time unintelligible. It lasted just a few seconds, but when he jolted to attention, he found no one there. The incident seemed strange enough that he resolved not to mention it to his roommate, who had already grown uneasy with the house’s idiosyncracies.

The next day, he came home and found his roommate in tears. When he asked what was wrong, she recounted an experience identical to his. When he came clean and told her he’d heard the same thing, she was so shaken that she moved out for two weeks. 

Later, near the end of the semester, they were sitting together at a computer on the first floor, working on a school project into the wee hours of the morning. Suddenly, from upstairs they heard what he recalls as “just this massive scream.”

His roommate had a “visceral, physical reaction,” he recounts, and turned bright red and immediately broke out in a sweat. Wilson scrambled upstairs — and, of course, found nothing. They moved out.

In the years since, he has visited the house and spoken with people who’ve lived there. When he asks, they tell him, “Oh yeah, stuff happens all the time.” Once agnostic when it comes to ghosts, Wilson has changed his story.

“I’m a believer,” he says.

Getting into the spirit

As mid-October approached, Wilson moved about his garage with purpose and enthusiasm, energized by the anticipated delivery of a mechanical arm he ordered to animate part of his display. A banner hanging from his front porch hints at what lies ahead: “Erie Poisonous Spider Petting Zoo & Life Insurance Company.”

Sometimes all the narrative needs is a jolt of adrenaline.

Wilson moved to Colorado in his late 20s and on those Halloween nights would do something fun and simple, a single prop that might employ a household gadget like a leaf blower. True to his childhood memory of that one spooky house, people loved even a basic effort.

Eventually, he designed and built his house in what was then a new subdivision called Erie Village. The idea behind the development required residents to link their design to turn-of-the-19th-century Colorado, which resulted in a definite Victorian energy. He eventually added one year-round literary touch: The “Once Upon a Crime” tiny free library perched by the sidewalk features only mysteries and thrillers. Opening the door triggers a recording of a long, sinister laugh.

Wilson’s seasonal workspace fills the two-car garage. Even illuminated for optimal working conditions, the scaffolding of his creepy-crawly horror hints at the fun ahead. Dozens of spiders appear to crawl down a wall, thanks to a loop of video images projected from behind a thin sheet. When Wilson activates the sound effects — echoing high-decibel knocks, squeaks and screeches — they trigger a flashlight that appears to scan the wall and reveal a disturbing swarm of arachnids. A footstep on a nearby covered pressure plate releases a giant, spring-loaded specimen.

The sound, Wilson notes, makes all the difference when the garage is dark and the fog machine adds to the atmosphere. “It doesn’t take much to freak out kids,” he says. 

He moves to other spots in the garage where motion sensors will drop spiders from above. He hangs strips of sheer ribbon from anchors overhead so visitors will brush them as they pass, adding a tactile element to the experience. He carries another large spider he plans to mount on the soon-to-arrive mechanical arm, and ponders how best to make it spring to life with the help of a motion sensor and air compressor. He’s also ordered a mechanical spider that moves about on its own. 

His fatigue has faded, replaced by the creative energy of the season.

“How many people screamed.”

Behind the scenes, Wilson adds technical expertise required to hook up control boards, air compressors, motion sensors and other hardware to animate the horror. Before trick-or-treaters and their parents arrive, he’ll mount some video cameras to capture the shrieks and laughter — and often, the exchanges just outside the garage between parents and their suddenly hesitant kids.

A self-described “data guy,” Wilson meticulously tracks each Halloween’s metrics.

“We keep count by hour,” he says. “I have sheets going back 15 years, 20 years, just handwritten sheets that are like: This was the theme. This was the weather. First kid came at this time. Last kid came at this time. Here’s how many per hour. How many people screamed.”

In nice fall weather, he’ll have up to 400 kids pass through his display, a healthy number bolstered by the fact that, in Erie Village, a lot of people go all out for the holiday. True to his data roots, he doesn’t count kids who pass through his display a second time “because I don’t want to inflate my numbers.” He does compare notes with neighbors. Invariably, he finds that they have a higher kid count, which he attributes to the trick-or-treaters who approach his garage but then think better of stepping inside.

Still, the vast majority want to check out the story. So maybe Wilson is composing more of a narrative than he realizes in the moment. 

“The main thing I go for is that it’s just creepy, intense, and then there’s a release at the end,” he says. “If that’s a parallel for a thriller, yeah. But the twist is always at the end, and there’s always a buildup.”

Also at the end, kids can knock at the door that leads from the garage to the mud room, and be rewarded with something sweet. And cheap. Don’t come for the show and expect a full-size Snickers on your way out.

“I’m not going to spend another $300 on candy,” Wilson laughs. “Their treat is the display.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.