The story
Ghoulsville was created by two brothers-in-law, Shawn and Mark, who found out they shared a love of Halloween and of building things. It began in the 1990s. With family and fifteen to twenty friends pitching in, they turned a family home in San Jose's Almaden Valley into a spooky show every October: a front-yard graveyard with tombstones, ground-hugging fog, and animatronic creatures, plus a garage haunt with a story to follow. Each show had its own story, written and directed by Mark and given a new theme every couple of years, and a towering ghoul named Clyde grew taller before your eyes.
It was always free, family-friendly, and low-gore, and on a typical night hundreds of people came through. Local papers and Halloween sites noticed: the Almaden Resident and Haunted Bay covered it in 2003, and AOL's San Jose local guide listed it in 2001. At its height it ran two to three weekends each October, three nights a week. The haunt ran through 2006, and this year it's back in a smaller form.