For two decades, Jeff Borne has been in the business of other people's nightmares. The Covington resident is the executive producer behind The Mortuary Haunted Mansion, the attraction at the dead end of Canal Street in New Orleans that has been a chilling seasonal tradition for 20 years. This Halloween, he is bringing that trade across Lake Pontchartrain, and he is bringing a party with it.
Spirits in the Park, billed as the Northshore's premier Halloween weekend destination from the Mortuary team, takes over the Great Lawn at Coquille Park in Covington for three days, Oct. 30 through Nov. 1. General admission is free. The festival runs Friday from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., Saturday from noon to 11:30 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 10 p.m.
It is the companion piece to The Sawmill Haunted House, a new attraction that opened Oct. 2 inside Coquille Park's River Mill Center and runs weekends and select weeknights through Nov. 1, with tickets starting at $25. The festival sits adjacent to the haunt, on the lawn outside.
The music is the spine of the weekend. Friday's bill features The Class of '98 Band and the Kings of Neon Glow Band. Saturday's music features Beaucoup Boogie, The Boogiemen and The Bucktown Allstars. Sunday closes with Yacht Rock Park and Paper Champ. Food trucks, vendors and cold drinks run throughout. Organizers have encouraged attendees to bring lawn chairs and blankets for the Main Stage.
Saturday and Sunday afternoons also bring a family festival area and kids zone, open from noon. Children are invited to wear costumes and trick-or-treat among the market booths. The scare-free area includes pumpkin painting, a robotics showcase, themed inflatables and colorful decorations. An arts and crafts market runs alongside, with vendor hours listed from noon to 8 p.m. Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday.
For families who want the scenery without the jump scares, The Sawmill offers a Lights-On Family Tour on Halloween Day, Oct. 31. The house lights come all the way up, the major scares go all the way down, and a guide leads visitors through the entire attraction. It is recommended for ages 6 and up, and costumes are welcome. Tickets are $20 for ages 15 and up and $10 for children under 15, plus fees, with advance reservations recommended.
The origin of all this is a front yard. Borne is known on the northshore for the extravagant Halloween decorations he puts up at his property just down the road from Coquille Park. Richard Bentley-Smith, executive director of Recreation District 14 and Coquille Park, spotted the display with his children, who kept asking to be driven past it again and again. When Bentley-Smith realized the house belonged to the man behind The Mortuary, he reached out and made a pitch: bring a haunted house to the northshore.
Borne had run a similar event at City Park in New Orleans, but it fell by the wayside during COVID. He told NOLA.com he had turned down requests from other towns to export his haunted house and festival, but this one felt different. It was five minutes from his headquarters, and with the northshore's population boom, he said, "It just made sense." Turning the dream into a "major production" took two years to realize the haunted house and several months more to assemble the festival.
The Sawmill is not a copy of The Mortuary. Borne and his crew built it around local lore, setting the attraction at a fictional "Widow's Landing" drawn from stories around Madisonville, with a lighthouse as its centerpiece. The 30-foot ceilings of the River Mill Center allowed for larger sets than the New Orleans house could accommodate. The legend, as the attraction tells it, involves river pirates executed along the shoreline, a Confederate hospital ship lost in an unnatural fog during the Civil War, and a black coffin hauled from the deep by a doomed fisherman. Characters include the Silk Lady of Madisonville and the Vampires of Lacombe. Borne has said the Sawmill is very different from The Mortuary and, in many ways, better.
There is also a blood-donation angle carried over from the Mortuary's playbook: give blood at any Blood Center donation site, present the free ticket at The Sawmill, and the visit is upgraded to VIP at no charge.
For Bentley-Smith, the free festival is the point. He said the park has hosted concerts before, but nothing at this scale, and he framed the weekend as a way to pull a fast-growing parish back together. "We've gotten to the point where most of us put up fences so we don't have to talk to our neighbors," he told NOLA.com. "Events like this take down those fences for us to understand we have more in common with our neighbors than we have not in common."
The festival is presented by The Haunted Mortuary Mansion, Eerie Ventures and Coquille Parks and Recreation. Coquille Park is at 13505 Highway 1085 in Covington. Admission to Spirits in the Park is free; the haunted house and the lights-on tour are ticketed separately.