Morongo Valley Halloween Extravaganza celebrates its fourth year of spooky community fun all weekend in Covington Park
The Fourth Annual Morongo Valley Halloween Extravaganza will be taking place Friday, Saturday, and Sunday this weekend in Covington Park, featuring all your favorite spooky activities, including a massive in-door haunted house, a 25-band music festival, and a dog mayor election all in one fun-filled weekend.
The town of Morongo Valley takes Halloween very seriously, and with no big city budget to rely on like our neighbors “up the hill,” organizer Buddy Stogner says it takes a village of determined volunteers to make the Halloween Extravaganza pop every spooky season.
But this year, they’ve taken over the whole Covington Park Community Center to make their infamous haunted house instead of the tennis courts where the construction is challenged by the wind. Even the directors of the Morongo Valley CSD, who usually conduct business at the community center, agreed to reschedule their monthly meeting to make room for the Halloween Extravaganza’s main attraction.
Stogner walked me through the transformation in progress, and during their week-long efforts they’ve rendered the six rooms unrecognizable with skeleton-painted black tarp constructing new walkways, with each room connected in an unnerving flow of homemade ghoulish décor. And when we got to the community kitchen, that’s when things got legitimately terrifying with a dissecting table in front of a scene I could only compare to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the stovetop. Stogner then walked me into the multipurpose room where I usually cover the CSD meetings for Z1077, and I was shocked at the metamorphosis.
The Halloween Extravaganza will also feature a Zombie Gel Blaster Shootout, a Trunk or Treat at dusk on Saturday, 30-bands for the Morongo Valley Music Fest running parallel, a costume contest, and at 2:00 on Saturday will be the infamous Morongo Valley Mayor Election––which was formerly strictly a dog’s race but is now any critter’s game due to last year’s inclusion of a chicken, and this year, a pig and a snake.
The Morongo Valley Halloween Extravaganza and Music Festival goes from 5:00-10:00 p.m. Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. on Saturday, and 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Sunday. For more information, call Buddy and Tammy Stogner at (760) 501-4826.
