Posted Thursday, September 21, 2017 11:18 am

The store is bringing money to Oceanside. People are not buried there so what’s the problem?” Lenny Rossello, Oceanside resident

“I don’t even drive on Long Beach Road anymore,” Brandi Henry said, “because I’m seeing the Halloween posters where I laid my son to rest.”

As of this month, the building that — until May — housed Vanella’s Funeral Chapel, an Oceanside establishment since 1965, is the temporary home of Halloween City, a seasonal offshoot of Party City. Henry added that sometimes she had to pull her car over to avoid getting sick when she passed the building, which hosted the funeral services for her son Max, who died at age 22 in 2015.

Joseph Vanella, whose family sold the funeral home after a legal dispute, wrote on Facebook, “As a funeral director who had the honor of serving the families of Oceanside over the past decade, I must say that I’m appalled by what the funeral home has become.”

Henry said that for the many locals who used Vanella’s services, “It’s sacred to us.”

“It’s just eerie.” she said. “Am I supposed to take my 10-year-old to the same place where she cried and said goodbye to her brother to look at costumes and ghosts and all that?”

Stephanie Corrao said in a Facebook comment that she “would not feel comfortable shopping in that store for Halloween stuff when I had to pick out my mother’s coffin in the same building.” Others expressed similar concerns about a lack of respect to the memories of loss and grief that linger. For many, the building was the last place they saw their loved ones before closing their caskets.

Christina Aurora commented that thinking about the funeral preperationsthat went on in the building gave her pause. “Ever seen a body being embalmed in a funeral home?” she asked. “It’s not pleasant. I personally don’t want to shop there knowing what goes on, and knowing all the sadness people experienced there.”

Two employees of Halloween City, who declined to be identified, said that the building’s former occupants added to the Halloween spirit, a sentiment also expressed by a number of online commenters.

The employees talked enthusiastically about the building’s history, and offered this reporter a tour of what they called “the spooky basement,” which was empty, dark and had a subterranean chill. As one of them described it, the underground room “eats all the light,” and the cell phone flashlights they used were hardly strong enough to reach the far walls.

They said that they wanted to turn the basement into a haunted house, to bring in more business, but that “corporate said no.” Halloween City’s corporate office, in Rockaway N.J., did not respond to the Herald’s request for comment.

One of the employees’ other ideas included creating the outline of a body in white tape, near the entrance, with a trail of fake blood leading through the aisles, as a guide for how to get the best shopping experience.

“Do you want to see the embalming room?” one of the employees asked. By peeking through one of the many holes in a length of peg-board racks near the entrance, one can see a fluorescent-lit room of cinderblocks, painted a pale yellow and covered by a thin layer of dust. On the opposite wall, is a chemical shower, which one of the employees explained with the question, “Have you ever seen what embalming fluid does to living skin?”

Henry said she wasn’t surprised by the employees’ enthusiasm. “I’m sure it’s a bunch of young people who are unaffected by this, who think it’s really cool to have a Halloween store that’s filled with other people’s spirits,” she said. “That’s morbid to me.”

On Facebook, Amy Schwartz Simon wrote, “There are certain institutions that warrant respect. Churches, temples and funeral parlors fall under that category. I feel that having the Halloween store in its place takes away from the dignity of what it once was.”

Others said that while final resting places, such as cemeteries, deserved respect, funeral homes aren’t in the same league. “It’s a building, who cares?” asked Lenny Rossello in the most liked post in the conversation at the time the Herald went to press. “The store is bringing money to Oceanside. People are not buried there so what’s the problem?”

In the second-most-liked post, Wendy Hoey Sheinberg wondered whether “people would complain if a movie theatre took over the location and showed the occasional scary movie.”

“It was a Five and Dime when my husband was growing up,” Laura Brower Wiedemeier wrote. “Things change, but it still seems inappropriate to have a Halloween store in a building that still looks like a funeral home.”

The Vanellas’ “V” logo was still displayed on the building’s doors as of press time.