Today we’d like to introduce you to Derek Young
Hi Derek, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’ve always loved decorating for Halloween and when I started decorating my home in 2011 I’d have visitors who would ask about other “haunted houses” they could visit. I already had a community of fellow Halloween enthusiasts that I could point them to, but writing down addresses on Post-it notes got to be a bit cumbersome. In 2013 I started printing homemade flyers that had 9 houses listed within a 5 mile radius of me and since then it’s turned into a professionally printed flyer and website featuring 300+ home haunts and attractions reaching from Ojai to San Diego.
The SoCal Haunt List has been featured on KCRW, KPCC, The Los Angeles Times, as well as NBC Los Angeles, KCAL 9 News, and in various podcasts, including Parks and Cons and LA Dreaming.
2024 has been the biggest year with 10,000 flyers in circulation all around the southland and tens of thousands of website visits in the weeks leading up to Halloween.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Generally speaking, this has always been a passion project, but as interest in the list grew distribution became a bit more challenging. As a one-man operation, that can limit the reach of the printed flyer version of the list. Over time I was able to pull together a website that would allow for more haunts and Halloween events to be listed with information and photos. It was a natural progression, but it’s also a lot to wrangle with over 300 submissions to review and approve. It’s important to me that people who use the list have the best possible experience while seeing all the amazing Halloween creations that SoCal is known for, so I’m happy to do it.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
When I’m not curating the SoCal Haunt List, I’m a prop maker and run the YouTube channel VanOaks Props (youtube.com/vanoaksprops), where I teach people how to make Halloween and Sci-fi props. It’s not at all what I thought I’d be doing at this point in my life, given that my background is in graphic design, but the pandemic forced a lot of people to shift careers, myself included.
I’ve been featured in Make: Magazine, Nerdist.com, and a variety of podcasts, and was even commissioned to make a replica of one of the doors in the Disneyland Haunted Mansion for Neil Patrick Harris.
Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
It’s always ok to ask for help. That’s how you build community.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://socalhauntlist.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/socalhauntlist
- Youtube: https://YouTube.com/vanoaksprops
