Most people know actor Jorge Garcia as the guy who played “cursed” Hurley on ABC’s Lost. When the show ended in 2010, Weezer even named an album after his character , featuring Garcia’s beaming visage on the cover. But beneath Garcia’s good-natured veneer, something darker lurks: a long-burning passion for horror, supernatural forces, and the macabre. For the past two years in Hawaii, where Garcia opted to stay once Lost wrapped, he’s become known to locals as the guy behind some of the freakiest haunted houses on the islands.

“I’m nuts about monster movies,” Garcia says. “I can never get tired of the Universal [Pictures] monsters. And the Hammer [Film Productions] movies use of color—especially the blood they used. So red, it added a heightened surreal quality to Christopher Lee’s Dracula. Even his eyes were red!”

The nightmare began last year when Hawaii-based stage director Kevin Keaveney launched Kailua OnStage Arts , a local theater company on the windward side of Oahu, and met Garcia through a mutual friend. The two men connected over a shared interest in haunted houses ; growing up, Keaveney’s was the family on the block that converted their garage into a haunt every year for Halloween. “Turns out, Jorge is a huge Halloween aficionado who travels to haunted houses all over and even goes to conventions like Monster Fest and HauntCon,” says Keaveney.

“I said this wouldn’t involve any financial investment on [Garcia’s] part, but all proceeds would get donated to the theatre,” Keaveney says. “And it all just ballooned beyond this small, one month thing I was thinking about. Apparently, Jorge had always wanted to have a haunt of his own and this gave him free reign to do it. He started pitching ideas for the kinds of sets he imagined, and with the level of detail he wanted to bring, I realized this wasn’t going to be something we could just put up in a week.”

When putting together a business model for his theatre company, Keaveney had a dream of hosting a haunted house each October. It would be a way to raise funds for the theatre between shows, another (albeit unconventional) opportunity for actors, and something fun for the community. After meeting Garcia, Keaveney decided to pitch him the idea and see if he wanted to get involved.

Keaveney found a warehouse space to house the haunt and spent the summer of 2017 building, painting, decorating, and installing sets. Meanwhile, Garcia fabricated nearly all the props on days he wasn’t on location filming Hawaii Five-0. He also came up with that year's overall theme and developed a storyline for their first haunted house: “Curse of the Crypt.”

“Because we’re approaching this from a more theatrical standpoint, we like to see some sort of story,” Keaveney says. “Last year, the story was that guests arrive at an ‘archeological dig’ where the head of the dig has suddenly disappeared and the guests are supposed to help find out what’s happening. They find these decrepit mummies, then they go through this time tunnel and end up back in ancient Egypt when the tomb was in operation and people are doing the embalming and sacrificing, and the Egyptian gods are there. Then at the very end, we discover there are these reptilian alien overlords who are kind of controlling the whole thing.”