As 2026 is our 25th Albertson Halloween House, I wanted to capture some of the stories of fun things that have happened along the way. This first A25 post will tell how it all started.

We moved into the house at 497 North 16th Street in San Jose in the summer of 2002. We were first time home owners and there were lots of home projects that we inherited from the previous owner. One of those projects was cleaning out the basement (the house came with a dirt basement that was about 1/4 of the area of the house) as the prior owner had really just left a lot of junk down there. Some of the items that we found were wooden trellises and lots of cardboard boxes.

When Fall came, we began thinking about Halloween and thought about how cool it would be to get to hand out candy from our own front porch. As a person who LOVES Halloween and immersive experiences, as well as all things medieval, I proposed, “What if we put up a little castle façade over our porch?” Michelle agreed.

I love making things out of found objects and I realized that the abandoned trellises and cardboard boxes from the basement would be just right for making a psuedo castle. I painted some castle ‘stones’ on the cardboard, tacked it to the trellises (making sure to add crenelations, of course) and voilà! Castle.

I added two banners with calligraphic A’s, two Halloween store torches and a wooden heraldic symbol I had lying around.

We dressed up in our Renaissance Faire costumes and had a ton of fun handing out candy to the neighborhood kids. In those days, there were tons of kids out roaming the streets all the time, so on Halloween we got to interact with lots of folks and they seemed to dig our cardboard and costume presentation.

While we would later decide to continue building Halloween houses every year (almost all of them having a wood structure with cardboard on top), that year we were just so glad to get to have a fun Halloween experience at our own house, handing out candy to kids in our neighborhood.