Darkness Rising, a Long Island haunted house that has run for nearly two decades, has canceled its 2026 season just weeks before opening night. The Copiague attraction cannot open this Halloween because the building it set up in was not approved for that use, and the Town of Babylon says no permits for a haunted attraction were filed for it.
On its website, Darkness Rising says only that “our 2026 season has been canceled due to circumstances beyond our control.” Owner Kevin Baird calls it a building problem he learned about too late, and he has launched a GoFundMe to recover his costs.
The Owner’s Account
Baird has run Darkness Rising for close to 20 years, since it started as a backyard haunt in 2006, and he has rented the Chettic Avenue building since 2019. He says he learned about a building problem too late to fix it. “We found out there was some issues with the building way too late,” he told News12 Long Island, which first reported the closure.
On the haunt’s GoFundMe, Baird lays out more. “After we signed the lease, we discovered an underlying issue involving the building itself that we were not aware of,” he writes. “We met with the Town to determine what we could do to resolve it, but were told the process couldn’t be completed before November.” Because the haunt is a subtenant whose lease ends in November, he writes, there was no way to postpone, so the season had to be canceled.
Baird told News12 he invested about $100,000 in this year’s attraction and now has to tear it down. On the GoFundMe he counts more than $62,000 of that as unrecoverable, spent on rent, labor, and materials, and says he financed much of the season on credit cards. “We had to cancel the haunt and now we have to go back in there and tear the whole thing down,” he told News12.
The Town’s Account
The Town of Babylon’s Department of Public Safety confirmed to HAN that the building was not approved for use as a haunted attraction. Its certificate of occupancy is an old one for light industrial use that “does not reflect current occupancy change of use,” and on September 2 the town determined there could be “no occupancy for change of use without town planning and zoning approval.” No permit applications or inspection requests were filed for a haunted attraction or assembly use at the address in 2026.
Town officials, including the Planning and Building Commissioner and the Chief Fire Marshal, met with the owner or tenant on September 3, and the town is awaiting their paperwork. The approval path runs from the Planning Department to Zoning for the change of use and then to the Fire Marshal’s Office for safety compliance. The change of use to a haunted attraction had not cleared that review before the season was called off.
The town gave News12 a similar account. News12’s report, titled “Condemned before Halloween,” attributed the word “condemned” to Baird. In its statement to News12, the town said the haunted house “was operating inside a building with no certificate of occupancy for that use and without the fire protections required of a special amusement under the fire code,” and that it “is willing to work with the operators on that process for next year.” Property records list 800 Chettic Avenue as an industrial building.
The Fundraiser
The GoFundMe, called Save Darkness Rising Haunted House, has a $50,000 goal and had raised about $3,762 from 36 donors as of Friday. Baird writes that he is “not asking our community to make us completely whole,” and that he plans to sell some props and costumes to recover what he can.
He also uses the campaign to make the case for the haunt itself. Darkness Rising began in his backyard in 2006 and, he writes, has grown into an attraction that draws thousands of visitors each Halloween and has helped raise more than $250,000 for local charities over the years. This season’s show was built around two houses, Dead City and Twisted Tales: The Nightmare Realm, on a single ticket. Baird says he is not finished, and told News12 he hopes to find a new location and bring Darkness Rising back for Halloween 2027.
HAN asked Darkness Rising to respond to the town’s account and had not received a reply by the time of this update. HAN’s public records request for the building’s permit and inspection history is pending.
Updated September 15, 2026 with the Town of Babylon’s response to HAN.
