BCVFD Welcomes Neighbors for Frightening Fun at Vollyville Prison
By Katie McFadden
It’s time to serve your sentence at Vollyville Prison. For those who love to embrace the scary side of Halloween, there’s no better place around town than the Broad Channel Volunteer Fire Department’s (BCVFD) Haunted House. After all, from responding to real life scary situations from fires to car accidents, these guys know firsthand what a real fright can be. They opened the firehouse for their latest haunt on October 26, and it’s so good, this attraction will be open for a few more nights, including on Halloween and through November 2.
Step right up to the BCVFD firehouse at 15 Noel Road and get ready to be locked into a thrilling prison experience. From taking your mugshot at the entrance, to traversing more than 100 feet of dark maze, passing jail cells, the prison bathroom with blood covered showers, the mess hall where the chef gets some of his ingredients from the infirmary around the corner, and the spot where some prisoners meet their final destination—the electric chair—unless they’re lucky enough to jailbreak, this attraction complete with wild lighting, special effects, disorienting elements and live and not so alive characters, with surprises at nearly every turn, making this haunted house seem like it’s done by the pros.
Instead, it’s hosted by the many members, volunteers and family members of those at the firehouse. But they might as well be considered pros as their annual haunted house is something they’ve been doing for at least two decades. “The goal of this is it’s a giant camaraderie builder for the firehouse and it’s a nice thing for the town,” Chief of Department George Conklin said. In fact, it all started at a time with a great sense of camaraderie in the volunteer firehouse.
“We really started right after 9/11,” BCVFD President Dan McIntyre said. “They had a big influx in membership here. We went from about 15 members to like 55 members. There were way too many members and they had too much time and one of the member’s brother or brother-in-law was a stage director in Manhattan and he did this for a living, so he volunteered all that help, and they brought the first haunted house here, taking up both stories of the firehouse. It was a really big, elaborate show and we did it for a number of years until it fell off.”
As McIntyre and Conklin explain, the haunted house took to the back burner when the firehouse, like all of Broad Channel, was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, so they took a few years off, and right after they brought it back, Covid came into play, once again putting it on pause, but since the BCVFD haunted house returned in 2021, it has grown in popularity, and as a recruitment tool and fundraiser for the firehouse. “Right after Covid, it started getting more popular,” Conklin said. “Last year, we had about 600 guests,” McIntyre said. “The furthest we had someone come from was Connecticut,” BCVFD member Lenny Cannella said. “It was trending on Twitter. We did a funhouse with clowns, and someone posted it, and it went viral,” Conklin said. “We had a lot of people from out of town. Someone said they saw it on Twitter and came all the way from the Bronx. It makes you feel good about doing this because it keeps growing and growing and it’s almost at a point where we can’t not do it.”
As a camaraderie builder for the members of the firehouse, and with guests seeing that, the haunted house has also helped boost membership. “I was a junior and I had moved out of town and came back and helped them with the haunted house and I wound up re-joining and now I’m the guy in charge,” Conklin said. “We got members back from doing it and last year, we got two new guys out of the haunted house.”
The haunted house also helps the firehouse’s annual fundraising efforts. McIntyre says they made about $8,000 from the haunted house last year, amounting to about $6,000 after costs. “We hope to get about 800 to 1,000 people this year and if we break $8,000, we’ll be happy,” McIntyre said. The funding goes towards the operating budget of the firehouse, which costs about $70K to $80K a year, most of which is covered by money raised during various fundraising events for the firehouse. Any bit helps as the BCVFD gets ready to hopefully break ground on their brand-new firehouse on Cross Bay Blvd. sometime in the spring.
In addition to raising funds, it’s also raised some funny moments along the way. Being a firehouse, there have been times when the crew has had to go out on calls during Halloween events. McIntyre recalled a time when the members were at a Halloween party, dressed as Broad Channel Athletic League cheerleaders, when a call came in for a house fire on 8th Road. “We all jumped into the fire engine and responded to the fire. The people all got out, but here we came with our cheerleading outfits and helmets on to fight the fire. We’ve responded to calls with people in costume as Dracula, and one of our EMTs was dressed as Elvira when she showed up to a house where a woman was having chest pain,” McIntyre shared. Those incidents are rare now, as the firehouse has so many volunteers for the haunted house, that others can jump in when a call comes in.
And there have been times when their jump scares have elicited unexpected reactions. “We did have quite a few people tinkle themselves coming through the haunted house,” Conklin said. “Two years ago, one of the women coming through saw the past chief in this crazy suit and she stopped and said, ‘Oh my God, I just wet myself.’” That might be an indication of just how scary the haunted house can get, but don’t worry. If it gets to be too much, scream the safe word, “Oklahoma!” and the lights come on and the scares stop.
Whether with lights on or with the full scares in the dark, don’t miss Vollyville Prison! Last chance to catch it is October 31, November 1 and November 2, from 7:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. Head to the firehouse at 15 Noel Road. Admission is $15 per person for $50 for groups of four. All ages welcome, but you must be 13 and over to enter without supervision.
