The Fresno Bee

Lucas Antonio is lost somewhere in a maze of clowns.

There are a dozen, or more, set up at the entrance of the Fresno Fright Nights, the Halloween attraction that opened at Island Water Park this month.

The contorted bodies are dressed in stripes and polka dots, bright shocks of colored hair atop plastic white faces with wide-smiles of monster teeth. Plug them in and the animatronics come to laughing, snarling life.

“They’re all their own characters, with their own names,” says Antonio, an 18-year-old “Halloween enthusiast” who helps design and equip haunted attractions with a collection of scary animatronics that numbers in the hundreds.

“They are just so basic and goofy, and I just have to have every single one of them,” he says of the clowns, which are designed and marketed through a company called Seasonal Visions International.

Antonio has been collecting nearly his whole life and turned what had been a neighborhood haunt in his front yard into a year-round gig.

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✍: @joshuatehee