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Phantasmechanic Haunts His House With Junk By TOM JACKSON tjackson@tampatrib.com Published: Oct 30, 2005
ZEPHYRHILLS -- With the front door in the raised position, the unassuming block outbuilding behind the ranch-style house on Palm Grove Drive provides no hint of what lies -- or, more accurately, lurks -- inside ... and that's just the way Carmen Cardenell likes it. After all, nobody saw Michael Myers coming with his mask and knife until it was too late, too. And, as a fan of suspense, Cardenell always liked Myers' stealthy style. Tonight and Monday, Cardenell, cadaver thin and 46, will be pleased to demonstrate why it is unwise to judge a building by its architecture. In the guise of the wild-eyed Dr. Franklin Havergast, director of the Hellsacre, Florida, asylum for the criminally insane, he will welcome small groups of the unsuspecting for a brief tour of his modest madhouse -- and it just may give his guests their best fright experience of this waning Halloween season. Its rating is probably PG-13, and Cardenell strongly issues the usual thrill-ride warnings: No heart conditions or risky pregnancies, please. As for parents with youngsters, "I think mom and dad should go through first without the kids," he says. "After that, if you want to take them through, the nightmare's on you." And here's a reason for pause: Once through the door of Dr. Havergast's greeting room, innocent victims -- uh, visitors -- will not encounter another living soul until -- unless -- they find the exit. Cardenell hasn't conjured the undead, exactly, so much as he has demonstrated his gift for what other extreme haunters call the "phantasmechanical" -- the ability to blend the spectral with gadgetry. "I know other haunted houses hate to see me coming," Cardenell says, "because all I'm interested in is seeing how they did it." Borrowing and innovating, the result is a creepy, spooky place where 11 distinct special effects rise, float, jump, hover and perform all manner of other demonic tricks exclusively on the strength of applied technology. "You can't count on actors," Cardenell says. Human ghoulies can be unreliable when it comes to rehearsals, they can stumble over props in the dark and they often demand potty breaks at impractical moments. Not so Cardenell's cast of robotic performers, which can be counted on to repeat their scare stunt time and again without complaint or error. Putting it together required Cardenell to be carpenter, electrician, plumber and mechanic, but, most of all, artist. "It's my outlet," he says. "Maybe it's a little morbid, but I have a knack." ## Understanding How Things Work On Christmas mornings when he was a lad, Carmen Cardenell's greatest pleasure arose from dismantling each of the toys that came from under the tree. It drove his mother crazy. While Cardenell's passion for disassembly was common for curious boys of a tender age, he had something the others lacked: a gift for putting things back together. Better still, Cardenell could take some of this toy and combine it with some of that toy and a little bit of the one over there and arrive at something spellbinding never envisioned by the fellows back in research and marketing. Long before he was shaving or able to drive, Cardenell had become a tinker's tinkerer. Driven by imagination coupled with hands that could craft a cold-fusion generator from springs, screws, sheet metal and a wad of insulated wire, Cardenell was well-suited for his eventual vocation as a traveling troubleshooter for Carter VerPlanck, a Tampa-based provider of water and wastewater systems. But his avocation -- while making extreme use of those same skills and talents -- is something else altogether. Recruited to haunt his sister's Halloween party in 1990, Cardenell has been puttering, researching and refining the tools of the macabre ever since. In recent years, he designed and equipped a haunted trail and also infested the leased space of a friend who set up a spook house in Lutz. "It's hard when you're renting space, though," Cardenell says. "You can't leave it up all year and make improvements as you go along." Which, in a roundabout way, is much of how Cardenell -- a lifelong Tampa resident -- wound up on Zephyrhills' south side, just off Gall Boulevard. He and his girlfriend, Anne Cardenell (more about whom soon), were looking for more space than to which they were accustomed in Tampa, a search that led to a happy result on Palm Grove Drive. Not only did the house and the yard provide precisely what they wanted in terms of acreage and price, there was the detached building, sort of a combination garage and barn, out back. "Once I saw that, it sold the deal," Cardenell says, "because I knew what I wanted it for." That was three years ago, but when the Havergast Asylum opens tonight (the door creaks open at 6 p.m.), it will be for the first time. Scheduling, poor health and hurricanes postponed earlier opening nights. Fittingly, Cardenell's haunted house has been pieced together much like Frankenstein's monster, from discarded, dead and obsolete parts. "I am a master Dumpster diver," he explains, which may be a slight exaggeration. In fact, much of what he has come by isn't the result of mechanical grave-robbing but seems to be the result of his willingness to adopt replaced parts -- no small amount of it gleaned from work. In their jobs, he and his partner, Allen Tyre -- Anne's brother -- replace pumps, pistons, valves and, occasionally, operations panels; rather than send them to the scrapheap, Cardenell asks if he can give the parts a new home. "I could teach Fred Sanford about collecting junk," Cardenell says. Adds Tyre, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." The result is an animatronics feast, with many of the effects mimicking those found in Walt Disney World's Haunted Mansion. Indeed, the main difference between the Havergast Asylum and the Haunted Mansion is the size of their respective budgets -- a reflection of Cardenell's resourcefulness. "He is really into it," says Anne, like Carmen a Tampa native, the love of the haunt master's life, his occasional guinea pig and ... his former wife. Yes, as befits a man devoted to breathtaking surprises, Cardenell keeps company with his ex-wife. Both remarried after their marriage fizzled, and when those marriages failed, they drifted back together. Instructively, when her second divorce was final, she took back her first married name, not because there were children involved -- they have none -- but because she preferred it. Plainly, she prefers Carmen, but without the paperwork. They live, happily now, with a Pomeranian named Cocoa, Samson the cockatiel and two shelties -- Velma and Daphne, the gals from "Scooby-Do," although Carmen would have preferred Lily and Morticia. You have to draw the line somewhere, Anne says. Tonight and Monday, Carmen will drag his beloved into the act, possibly as something resembling a corpse queen. "I'm a good person," Anne says. "I put up with a lot of" stuff. Visitors also should keep this in mind: The Havergast Asylum, though chaotic, does not go for the cheap scare. Where others rely on body parts and gore, Cardenell prefers suspense. "Guts all sprawled out, that's unnecessary," he says. Not when every dark corner may contain something coiled and ready to ... SPRING! ## IF YOU GO WHAT: Dr. Franklin Havergast's Asylum WHERE: 38141 Palm Grove Drive, Zephyrhills HOURS: 6 to 10 tonight and Monday COST: Free "I know other haunted houses hate to see me coming, because all I'm interested in is seeing how they did it." CARMEN CARDENELL Write a letter to the editor about this story Subscribe to the Tribune and get two weeks free Place a Classified Ad Online

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