Monday, October 5, 2020

  My Anaheim Halloween Parade Journey

Submitted by Lea Browning



After retiring from building haunts in Arizona and starting a semi-retirement job at Disneyland in 2014, I was lucky enough to stumble across an absolutely great group of Haunters at the Anaheim Halloween Parade.

My journey started out as all do, with baby steps. 

I worked around the warehouse on Anaheim Blvd. before the big move cleaning up and doing odd jobs helping out, then came the big day.  The day of the parade, we were short pushers for the floats (this was before we acquired the awesome cart chassis that we have now) I volunteered to push one of the floats. 

The Haunted House, it looked different than it does today, it was much bigger, well bigger is not always better especially when you are pushing it down the parade route with wheels that are not wanting to all go the same direction.


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 It was still a blast, I had helpers, but they were so excited they were waving at the crowd and forgot to push. We made it and had a great time, this is such an awesome event for the City of Anaheim.


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Fast forward a few years, we have space in another warehouse and we have carts that we build the larger floats on.

We have created some new designs, the Haunted House got a make-over, it is a smaller version of the old mansion, and no one has to push it.

Bill, Ken, Melina and I created a “Ghost Dissipater” float, it is a “Steam Punk” inspired machine that vacuums up ghosts and sends them off to wherever ghosts go.




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Our Ghost team has refined and tweaked and we have one of the coolest floats in the parade.  (Sorry I’m kinda partial to our “little” machine, and the best part is I get to drive it.)




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Ken is the bellows for the vacuum and Melina is the ghost chaser. God bless her she walks in heels the whole parade route.  Bill, well he is the brains behind the curtain.



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This is a wonderful group of ghouls that I am so happy to call my friends.  Here’s hoping that we can make it through this 2020 rough patch and get back to haunting soon.




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HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE!
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