Driving through a quiet neighborhood in Saugus, a passerby would never expect to see a masterful one-story castle — complete with gargoyle statues and medieval faux wooden doors — situated between two otherwise ordinary houses. But every Halloween season, that’s exactly what they’d find.

One of the largest and arguably most popular Halloween Haunts in the Santa Clarita Valley, “Beware the Dark Realm” draws thousands of curious newbies and loyal fans alike to creator Scott Sively’s home on Sugar Pine Way every year.

“You’re going to be able to feel like you’re actually part of a horror movie,” Sively said of the experience of venturing through the castle’s mysterious winding pathways. “You’re going to feel like you’re back in time, and you’re going to see some scary, ghoulish things.”

More than two dozen professional actors who have worked events like Fright Fest and Knotts Scary Farm in the past are preparing to scare those brave enough to enter on opening night Friday, with four chances to experience “Beware the Dark Realm” this year.

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“Some people will get really scared; some people will just be amused,” Sively said. “Pretty much when people go though, they’ll have a really good time, and for a can of food for the Food Pantry, that’s not a bad admissions price.”

Last year’s event saw about 3,000 people total, and Sively is hoping for even more this year. Small groups will be allowed to enter the castle for the roughly 10-minute walk-through, and Sively’s goal is to keep wait times under 30 minutes.

“I don’t want anybody waiting. I’ve heard some people wait at other Haunts for two hours,” he said. “That’s too long as far as I’m concerned.”

A seasoned Halloween Haunt organizer, Sively and his family have been residents of their home on Sugar Pine Way since 1988, and have put on some sort of Halloween event there every year since.

“I’ve been doing Haunts since 1971, so I’ve had a few years experience,” Sively said with a grin, noting that he previously worked on the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society’s Heritage Haunt and “Horror Valley High School ” at Golden Valley. “I’ve only met two people that have been doing it longer than me, and after 45 years … I should have everything down.”

Sively’s inspiration for “Beware the Dark Realm” actually came from the 1938 film “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” and he and his family and friends build many of their own props and animatronics that they work on at the house year-round.

“Our budget is absolutely nothing — my usual joke is, ‘As much as my wife will allow me to spend before divorcing me,’” Sively laughed. “We build whenever we get a chance. If I get some free plywood and I just happen to get some styrofoam and I just happen to have some things to add onto it, then I kind of go from there.”

Despite these budget limitations, “Beware the Dark Realm” continues to grow every year, and was recently selected as one of the top five Home Haunts in Southern California by the makers of a documentary called “Epic Home Haunts.”

Sively noted he appreciates the recognition, but joked that his segment might be boring because he and his family are too “normal.”

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“Most Haunt people, if you meet them, aren’t really that insane type of people that you think they might be,” he said. “Most of them seem like pretty much average, normal people. I mean, I’m not the Kardashians — there’s not going to be any drama going on here.”

Halloween has always been one of Sively’s favorite holidays, but when his unusual height stopped him from being able to “trick-or-treat” at a young age, he had to come up with another way to celebrate.

“At the age of 10, I was six feet tall,” he recalled. “When I went trick-or-treating to the houses and stuff, people were like, ‘Kid, you’re too old to be trick-or-treating.’ … People weren’t giving me treats at all.”

Fittingly, Sively grew up in a house on Gothic Street in the San Fernando Valley, and found himself inspired when he saw a neighbor dressed up in costumes chasing kids around the neighborhood.

“I stopped and I watched him one time … and I thought to myself, ‘If I can’t trick-or-treat, that’s what I want to do,’” he recalled.  

Like many at that time, Sively’s early Halloween Haunts were mazes constructed out of furniture boxes saved for him by a local department store, with hanging masks and cut-outs as decorations, shredded newspaper on the ground and jack-o-lanterns lining the walls.  

“In the early age of doing Halloween Haunts — not a lot of people talk about this — they were rather strange. They were like giant rat mazes,” he recalled. “The only thing that was rather precarious about it was the pumpkins had real candles inside of them, ‘cause we didn’t have the fake candles like we have now. How one of those never fell down into the newspaper and caught fire and killed everybody was beyond me, but somehow it wound up working out.”

To this day, Sively loves the creativity of constructing his own maze and decorating it with the help of his friends and family.

“Let’s face it — how often do you get a chance to actually be creative?” he said. “I’m a mailman, I’ve been delivering mail out here for 37 years, so there’s not a lot of creativity in (that). This gives me an opportunity to get artistic (and) have some fun, and get to do stuff with my family and get to do something for the community too. So the combination of all of that is a lot of fun.”

Beware the Dark Realm is set to open Friday and Saturday the weekends of October 21-22 and 28-29 from 7 to 10 p.m., with “Non-Scare” tours available from 6 to 7 p.m. every night of the event.

The cost of admission is a canned food item for donation to the Santa Clarita Food Pantry. The Halloween Haunt is located at 28621 Sugar Pine Way in Saugus. For more information, click here.

Photos and video by Andrew Menjivar and Lori Bashian.