Burbank Area Yard Haunts 2020: Holiday Fantasies Come to Life, Pierdell Phantasmagoria, Discount Pest Control, and More

North Hollywood and Burbank CA

We’ve danced around all through multiple parts of Southern California to present some of the fun and impressive home haunts and Halloween yard displays this year, but we now come upon the community that might be the thriving heart of residential Halloween in all of SoCal. The City of Burbank and adjacent neighbors are home to many creative types, artists, and showbiz folks who work at design studios, movie companies, or places like Disney and Universal. To no surprise, this also means that there are a lot of homes that feature some pretty awesome Halloween displays. This doesn’t mean each Burbank Halloween display came from a Hollywood creative, but it does mean that there’s a much greater concentration of quality haunts here than there is pretty much anywhere else—even Santa Clarita (which we’ve already focused on this and last year).

Lets take a look at some Burbank home haunts, with plenty more to come

Holiday Fantasies Come to Life presents FANTASMIC!

We’ve been fans of Holiday Fantasies Come to Life ever since our friends at Parks and Cons told us about this intricately and immensely detailed Pirates of the Caribbean yard display a couple of years ago. For many years, wife and husband team Tina and Ernie have showcased their incredible love of Disney and passion for crafting and home decorating by filling (and I mean FILLING) their front yard with elaborate Disney characters, theming, lights, and props, and completely making over their house into castles or pirate ships or any other large scale structure that completely overshadows and covers their regular home!

This year, Arnie and Tina present FANTASMIC!, their general tribute to Disneyland. With the parks closed since March, this might be the closest one comes to that Disney ambiance. The yard display features a plethora of scenes and characters from the iconic show—and a bit of creative license in adding a few villainous characters that are not part of the nighttime Rivers of America spectacular but are part of Disney villain lore.

Holiday Fantasies Come to Life has made the astounding seem routine. Their FANTASMIC! display this year brings their brand of thoroughly impressive theming to even new heights!

By the entrance, Mickey Mouse does battle with Maleficent in both her sorceress and dragon forms, right next to a massive sorcerer’s cap. Moving right across the yard, there’s the Chernabog from Fantasia, Cruella DeVil, a ghoulish zombie dog-napper, King Louie and Kaa, Ursula (with a mermaid skeleton lying next to her), and even the Snow White’s Evil Queen in the living room window beyond. Tiki scenes, dalmations, and a few gravestones and ghosties complement things.

This year seems to have brought the addition of a lot more animatronic elements to the scene. The dragon, the zombie dog capturer, the Chernabog, and even some enchanted broomsticks all have moving parts. The dognapper and Chernabog even speak with sinister dialogue. In addition, Ernie has completely redone the castle facade from past years, rebuilding the castle walls with new material and rigging new lighting on the roof to add extra glow.

All of this adds up to a simply overwhelming amount of Disney ambiance, and plenty of guests have walked or driven by, amazed at the effort put into all of this!

Their Halloween display includes a spookier ambiance and more Disney villains than usual!

Holiday Fantasies Come to Life is located at 1505 N Valley St, Burbank, CA 91505 and runs nightly from around 7:00 until… it varies really. But they’re usually open past the 10:00pm standard that most haunts operate until. The display in its current form will be up until the weekend after Halloween before Tina and Arnie start modifying it for a Christmas version of FANTASMIC! that will be less villain-centric and more princess-featuring.

Pierdell Phantasmagoria

Strange things are afoot at the Pierdell Cemetery. First, there’s the creepy skull who banters and wisecracks at passers-by. Then there is the incredibly creepy baby on a high chair that slowly seems to levitate out of its seat. What’s a baby doing in a cemetery anyway? That seems like child endangerment—even if this looks more like a zombaby than regular human flesh baby. A hunched over butler carries a lantern within the graveyard. And to the side, wispy spirits float in and out of our mortal plane, materializing with screams out of nowhere.

Welcome to Pierdell Cemetery, home to a phantasmagoria of haunts and creeps!

Indeed, at Pierdell, there really is a Phantasmagoria of activity. A pretty intimate haunt, this yard display features a collection of spooky figures and custom-made characters spread throughout the front yard. A skeleton in the background seems to wave high, and a floating doll does its best to unnerve those who notice it. Overall, Pierdell Phantasmagoria is a fun, quaint little haunt with its own unique character.

Ghostly projections, moving figures, and haunting lighting encapsulate this intimate but handmade Halloween yard display!

Pierdell Phantasmagoria is located at 6245 Whitsett Ave, North Hollywood, CA 91606 and runs nightly through the end of this weekend from 7:00 - 9:30pm. Please note that parking may be a little difficult on Whitsett and may require parking on an adjacent side street.

Discount Pest Control

Well, they say you get what you pay for, and at Discount Pest Control, the payment must be pretty low, because this attempt at exterminating a monstrous insect infestation seems to have gone horrifically, horrifically wrong!

Visitors arriving at the premises will find tons of insectoid carnage with gore so over the top that it's branched into the realm of being cartoonish. Giant, bulbous spiders; carnivorous scorpions; disgusting, human-sized worms; and impaled or eviscerated or mutilated exterminators lounge the yard and even hang over the sidewalk. My favorite detail was the murder hornets (okay, giant wasps) buzzing high overhead of the residence itself! It's a simple but really cool effect.

Discount Pest Control shows what happens when you’re unprepared for a force much deadlier than you expected.

The owner, Eric, is a magician by day who has taken to designing props and effects items recently. Everything in this haunt is custom made or adapted, and the results are wonderfully grotesque. There are plenty of morbidly humorous details—some silly, others a little darker. From the company sign with multiple mispellings to the wide variety in which the exterminators are killed, this yard haunt will get a morbid chuckle out of anyone who looks a little closer. Thought like this is appreciated, since it shows commitment to storytelling—no matter how absurdly bloody that story is!

Discount Pest Control may be premised upon going cheap and going wrong, but is definitely a quality production!

There are lots of tongue-in-cheek details at Discount Pest Control, from a commitment to really showing how discount everything really is to flying murder hornets (or wasps) above the home!

Discount Pest Control is located at 2020 N Manning St, Burbank, CA 91505 and runs nightly through Halloween night, from 7:00 - 10:00pm. It’s also one of over forty entrants into this year’s City of Burbank Halloween Decorating Contest—twice the normal amount!

Haunt on Edison Blvd

On the way from Rotten Apple to Discount Pest Control, I caught this modest but creative yard display along Edison Blvd. It was smaller in scope than the others in this post, but a reminder of the extents to which some of the residents go to decorate with more than just basic lights and a few inflatable props. The little graveyard out front, a giant spider feasting on the remnants of a hapless victim, and a grim reaper figure created a fun little scene bathed in shades of red, green, and purple.

This display is located at 1604 N Edison Blvd, Burbank, CA 91505.

This modest display on Edison Blvd was still noteworthy enough to stop for a quick look.

In any other neighborhood, this would be a prominent display in and of itself.

In Burbank, it’s nice but simply one of many displays that include custom elements.

Haunt on Pass Ave

Finally, I wanted to feature I random, unlisted yard display that I passed by last year (coincidentally on Pass Ave) that I think is also decorated this year, though it was dark by the time I drove by at a late hour. Parks and Cons labelled this, simply, the “Haunt on Pass Ave,” which is as straightforward of a name as any. We both actually discovered this one on our own, simply driving on our way to other haunts.

This particular display has a family friendly atmosphere, with a couple of friendly skeletons simply out on a date, and beautiful lighting spread throughout the home’s front porch and yard. A literally SPOOKY sign next to another skeleton offers some playfulness. Towers of jack-o-lanterns and skulls mix in a bit of macabre, while a veritable carousel of floating ghouls hints at a bit of the supernatural, but everything always feels cheerful and welcoming.

As far as the yard haunts we saw last year, this one was one of the pleasant complete surprises, because its efficient, cozy quality was something we weren’t expecting to see out of the blue. But it goes to show that there are plenty of Halloween treasures in Burbank, and most of them aren’t really on any particular social media or haunt community list. You just have to go out and encounter them. It’s certainly a bit of trick or treat on a community scale!

It’s an intimate, colorfully lit, pretty cute collection of Halloween goodness!

The Haunt on Pass Ave is located at 824 N Pass Ave, Burbank, CA 91505. Assuming it’s actually running this year (it was dark but looked decorated when I passed by), it should be operational nightly through Halloween, from 7:00 - 10:00pm or so.

I ended up passing by on Halloween night this year and stopped to check it out. Unfortunately, the display wasn’t quite as colorful and elaborate this year, on account of the owner not really having enough time to set up as much as he wanted to. Of course, with 2020 being the way it’s gone, perhaps a more subdued display was actually appropriate. Here are a few photos below from this year’s Haunt on Pass Ave!

We’ve got two more posts dedicated to just Burbank area haunts—with a few in neighboring Toluca Lake as well. These will feature just a small percent of the number of elaborate Halloween displays located all throughout the city. One can just drive around random streets and find creative displays that celebrate the season. It’s what we absolutely love seeing and discovering. The heart of home haunting is just doing something for love and passion of the craft, without regard to attention or who sees it. All the same, we enjoy highlighting noteworthy residences that impressed us, so that others can enjoy their Halloween spirit too!