Long before Halloween became an industry, New Glarus already knew how to build a good haunted house. Give a group of volunteers an empty building, a few sheets of plywood, some cardboard boxes, a coffin, a few props and a lot of darkness, and they could create something people would remember for decades. 

New Glarus had its share of those homemade Halloween attractions. In the 1970s and 1960s, the New Glarus Jaycees used vacant or unusual buildings around the village for haunted houses that doubled as community fundraisers. What survives today is part newspaper record and part local memory — a mix of documented rooms, real jail cells, cardboard tunnels and the sound of a chainsaw roaring somewhere in the dark.

The idea was part of a much larger American tradition. Halloween historian Lisa Morton told Smithsonian Magazine that early haunted-house attractions grew from Depression-era basement parties and “trails of terror.” By the 1970s, the United States Junior Chamber, better known as the Jaycees, had become closely associated with charity haunted houses across the country. The concept was successful enough that the organization produced guidance for local chapters on how to stage them.

That national movement arrived in New Glarus in a particularly local way: not in purpose-built attractions, but in buildings residents already knew — an abandoned milk plant, an old Swiss club, a former movie theater and the basement of the old Town Hall.