Mischief Studios, a music school in downtown Pennington, is spooky all year — black walls, purple trim, and skeletons posed with guitars — but when Halloween arrives, owner Charles Laurita turns the dial from “decorated” to “full transformation.”
Laurita, a Hamilton native and lifelong October loyalist, is now preparing for his fourth Halloween on Main Street. The entire studio becomes a themed walk-through experience for trick-or-treaters, complete with animatronics, costumed volunteers, and props that he and his family build by hand.
“This is my fourth Halloween, and I’m really excited,” Laurita said. “We had almost 500 trick-or-treaters last year, and now that it’s on a Friday, I’m hoping we can bust that. Kids can be out later since it is a Friday. It’s going to be great.”
Even before October arrives, Mischief Studios already looks like something out of a storybook haunted mansion: deep purple walls modeled after the color inside Disney World’s Haunted Mansion, black doors and trim, and a rotating cast of skeleton “musicians” tucked around the studio. Laurita and his father built the entire interior themselves after he left a corporate teaching job to open the studio during the pandemic.
“None of the walls were here when we got it. We built everything,” he said. “It was an awesome father-and-son project.”
Today, Mischief Studios serves about 170 students a week and employs 14 teachers — a thriving year-round hub that just happens to lean a little spooky by design.
“This is a learning educational place, but disguised as a haunted house, which is great,” Laurita said. “Kids will be on their way home from school and just stop in to say hey. I love having a place where everybody feels welcome.”
The heart of the Halloween transformation began with Molly — a giant hand-built spider created for the studio’s very first October. She now “lives” on the wall above the lobby, a furry, wide-eyed guardian of the space.
“I would go to Spirit Halloween and everything was so expensive and looked terrible,” he said. “So we started building our own. We were like — we can do this better.”
The week of Halloween is crunch time. Mischief Night turns into a full teardown and scenic reset, with volunteers and friends re-theming each practice room for the one-night walkthrough.
“People don’t realize how much goes into this for just one night,” Laurita said. “But when I pop out the door and see a line down the block — it’s worth it.”
What Laurita is building is less a haunted house and more a place of wonder — the kind of Halloween he says he wanted as a child.
“Halloween for me is not blood, guts, gore or jump scares,” he said. “Halloween for me is the appreciation of the macabre.”
Each year, trick-or-treaters converge on both Pennington and Hopewell Borough, with some streets drawing hundreds of families in a single night. In Pennington, the route through Main Street and Burd St. has become a seasonal ritual of its own — kids spilling from porch to porch before waiting in line at Mischief Studios the spooky walk through.
“So many people are obsessed with Santa Claus,” Laurita said. “But Christmas is just one day a year. We always have a skeleton with us though so why shouldn’t we celebrate it?”
