This Woodbury neighborhood draws thousands of visitors for its Halloween displays
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For most of her life Shelly Ahrens lived in deep rural Minnesota, where putting up Halloween decorations just didn’t make sense.
“When you’re on a farm isolated in the country you can enjoy them, but no one else is going to see them,” Ahrens said. “But here is a prime opportunity. We’re on a corner, we’re in a neighborhood that enjoys Halloween — we kind of moved to the right spot by accident.”
Ahrens is talking about the neighborhood of Royal Oaks in Woodbury, known as The Haunted Oaks during the month of October. Over 100 houses in the area decorate for Halloween, and no display is quite the same. Residents liken it to a slice of Salem in the Midwest.
On a Saturday night a few weeks before Halloween, Ahrens and her mom Linda are sitting on their driveway in lawn chairs watching small crowds mill about from house to house, snapping pictures of decorations and admiring the intricacy.
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Ahrens usually works nights, so it’s a special treat getting to see the soft launch of The Haunted Oaks.
“I go off the rails, because you can’t be classy on Halloween. There’s just no point in that. I tried to start with the gravestone theme, but then we moved on to spiders. We’ve added witches, we’ve added ghouls and, of course, the lights. You can’t just stop with a few items. We just keep adding and adding and adding because people keep coming, and I’m glad they do,” Ahrens says.
How The Haunted Oaks came to be
The big night for The Haunted Oaks is, of course, All Hallows’ Eve. In 2025, about 2,200 trick-or-treaters came; but they expect to beat that number this year, says Derek Schmidt, a lead organizer and self-proclaimed “PR guy” of the event.
According to Schmidt, the neighborhood was created in the 1960s for employees of the nearby 3M headquarters. In the last five to 10 years, as original owners have decided to move out and downsize, younger families have entered the neighborhood.
Starting in 2019, a handful of neighbors got together to team up on displays, and The Haunted Oaks was born.
“We never told the neighbors that they needed to decorate or had to decorate. People kind of just added on year after year. We’ve had people move to the neighborhood just to be able to participate. We’ve had people that have attempted to sell in the past decide to stay. Our neighborhood doesn’t do a big ‘National Night Out’ or a block party. Halloween’s kind of our jam,” Schmidt said.
Neighborhood bands together to make Halloween special
Schmidt says he thinks about The Haunted Oaks all year — it’s hard not to when he’s deep in planning and attending City Council meetings for logistics. This year, for the first time, the city of Woodbury agreed to close the streets in The Haunted Oaks to traffic on Halloween night. Schmidt compares the parking and traffic situation to a Minnesota Vikings game at U.S. Bank Stadium.
Because the event is free for people to attend, Schmidt and others have had to brainstorm funding to pay for overtime for police officers for safety patrol and renting out nearby school parking lots. The rest of the money all goes into a candy fund, so if any owner in the neighborhood wants to participate but can’t afford to do so, they are guaranteed at least one big bag of candy.
Some local businesses have also donated money, and bars are naming drinks in honor of the event — like The Haunted Oaks martini — and donating a portion of the proceeds to the group.
“We’re just a bunch of homeowners that decorate,” Schmidt said. “We’re not a business. We’re not a formal organization. We’re just people that want to decorate for the community.”
Joe Briol and his husband John Pundsack have been living in Royal Oaks since 1996. They’ve watched the neighborhood change and remember a time when, at the most, they had maybe 50 trick-or-treaters. Now they serve as the official counters on Halloween and also as candy runners.
If a house is low on candy, Briol, Pundsack or another volunteer runs to the house in need with a wagon full of candy from the candy fund. A trail of kids usually follow, eager to see where it is dropped off.
“There were a lot of just-in-time moments last year where we rolled up and people were literally on the last thing in their candy bowl, and they said, ‘You are letting me stay open another half hour because of this,’” Briol said.
One yard features a real Cessna plane
Schmidt has met several of his neighbors from being involved in The Haunted Oaks, like Sarah Anderson. She’s always had a knack for pumpkin carving and a decade ago started carving foam pumpkins, which she can reuse each year to grow her collection. Her famed “pumpkin wall” has over 70 on display.
It’s a way to connect with her neighbors, she says, and a conversation starter.
“When we’re handing out candy on Halloween, people really talk about it. We’ll just chit-chat. And it’s really nice to build that community,” Anderson said. “This is significantly less messy, and then I just get to grow and grow.”
At Katie Rust’s house, there’s the haunted afterlife of flight 1031, including a real Cessna plane that was formerly sitting in a local boneyard (and will return there after the display is over). She isn’t a fan of the scary parts of the holiday, opting to indulge in creative storylines through her decorations.
A question that many of the Haunted Oaks residents face is storage. Some have rafters riddled with displays and tightly packed tubs lined in the basement. For Rust, it’s two storage lockers. Last year she got the call that one was broken into. She knew she had to warn the police things weren’t exactly what they seemed if they opened it up.
“We had to tell the police, ‘Before you walk in, just be careful. You know, that there’s nobody dead in there. It’s really like 25 skeletons,’” she said about the locker.
The public is welcome to visit The Haunted Oaks every evening through Halloween, with lights and animatronics on nightly until 9 p.m.
