The Hernandez family stands in front of one of their transformed haunts at Old City Park.

Provided by Ricardo Hernandez

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and Ricardo Hernandez has built a very successful business on turning garbage into cold, hard cash. The Dallas-based entrepreneur began hauling away unwanted furniture and accessories 20 years ago when his father gifted him a van. 

“I started posting on Craigslist, then Google came around, and my junk removal business started soaring,” Hernandez recalls. “I was going back and forth picking up people’s junk, and one day… my friend said, ‘Hey, with all this junk you’ve got, you should make a haunted house.’ I thought it was the dumbest idea ever.”

But he still took a chance, charging residents in his first location, his warehouse on Sylvan Avenue in Oak Cliff, just five dollars to get in. By the time he hired his sister Maribel as a set designer three years later, Hernandez says he was raking in more than $100,000 for the season.

“I use social media like it’s going out of style,” Hernandez says. “And I wasn’t disposing of my trash; I was reusing it. I was double-dipping my business, and I started to see a lot more money in my junk removal because I wasn’t dumping as much.” 

The Fort Worth location of Junkyard Haunted House was summoning the spirits for last year’s installation.

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As the middle child in a large, tight-knit family, he has since provided work for his sisters, brother and each of their kids. The Hernandez haunted side hustle keeps growing — a Fort Worth outpost made its debut on Chester Street in 2024 and was joined this year by a separate “Stranger Things”-themed haunt next door. Now, all of their haunted house locations are open every weekend through the end of October.

Hernandez’s ability to re-purpose brown furniture and used mattresses and transform them into smoke-filled mazes and haunted rooms full of freaks and ghouls was a win-win. Each year, he and his crew sit down and come up with a higher concept for the season to keep things fresh.

“We give my sister a vision and an idea, and she comes up with the craziest ideas ever,” Hernandez says. “Some of them are expensive, and some of them are cheap. I’ll say ‘I want to do Stranger Things this year,’ and we dial down and have a meeting like a real business. Some of the shit she does I would never do, but it works.”

With a faster pace at the Dallas location, and a slightly slower, storytelling approach in Fort Worth, Hernandez divides sections of his haunts into different scary zones.

“This year we’re pushing a haunted library; we’re pushing church. We made it rain outdoors last year during the season, and people loved it,” he says. 

As Hernandez was already killing it with his existing locations, he was looking for a new challenge with a new site when the most exciting haunt to date presented available: Old City Park. The site has sentimental value for Hernandez, as he was married there back when it was called Heritage Village. After some back and forth with the City of Dallas, they agreed on a fair rental fee.

Ironically, the site already had some spooky history. Full of buildings from the 1800s relocated from other sites across the state, Old City Park had an established haunted reputation and used to offer late-night Victorian Spectre tours around Halloween. Since most of the interiors and furniture were auctioned off a few years back, the empty buildings are eerier than ever and ripe for Hernandez to take their history and run with it. 

“When you go at night, it’s a freak show; it’s scary as fuck,” he laughs. “But now imagine City Park at night and all the trees lit up with lighting and thunder and the sound system going. Every house is lit up with fog flowing out of them and music playing inside. We decided to put actors inside the buildings, and they’ll tell a story that will scare the shit out of you.”

Hernandez also took inspiration from the history of existing structures at the site.

“The Renner schoolhouse was moved there (from Carrollton), and we took that idea and came up with the teacher locking the doors and lighting the building on fire. When you step right up, (the host) will push you inside, and that’s when the show happens.” 

Of the seven haunted house experiences on offer at the site, Hernandez is most excited about the notorious Millermore mansion, a site so eerie he and his team refuse to work inside at night. He says both he and his sister, Emily, felt an invisible entity tap them on the shoulder while measuring the space for props. 

With scare zones, lighting and sound effects, Old City Park looks to become the crown jewel in this haunted empire. All of his sites offer free parking and reasonable entry fees ($25 for the original Sylvan site, $40 for the Park and Fort Worth), keeping the scares affordable should help him solidify his role as the reigning King of Halloween. 

“I’m proud of providing for my sister, my older sister and my brother, that hits my soul,” Hernandez says. “And we want to keep on expanding. We’re 100 percent going to Denton next year. Denton is the capital of Halloween, and we’ll be the number one haunted house in Denton in one year!”

All three Junkyard Haunted House locations (2700 Sylvan Avenue in Dallas, 2423 Chester Street in Fort Worth and Old City Park at 1515 South Harwood Street) are open from 8 p.m. – 12 a.m. every weekend through Oct. 31. A “Golden Ticket” to cut the line at all three locations can be purchased for $100 online.