Conversations with Derek Young

Today we’d like to introduce you to Derek Young.

Hi Derek, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
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.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
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.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
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.

What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
It’s always ok to ask for help. That’s how you build community.

Contact Info:

• Website: socalhauntlist.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/socalhauntlist
• Youtube: YouTube.com/vanoaksprops