Vandals destroy haunted house and hurt local charities - KFVS12 News & Weather Cape Girardeau, Carbondale, Poplar Bluff

Police in West Frankfort say that sometime over the weekend vandals broke into the SCARE Association haunted house on Main Street and destroyed the place.

The vandals broke every light in the place, ripped the plywood from the walls and busted it into pieces.

They destroyed all the displays and scary props and even stole some of them.

But, their destructive ways have taken more than a scary place away from people on Halloween.

"My wife Tara, started this haunted house more than a decade ago to help a local family whose daughter had cancer and couldn't pay their medical bills," Dave Chambers said.

All of the work to build it, some of the props were donated by local carpenters, community colleges and some of the students in West Frankfort schools have helped make the place a success.

Over the past decade or more the SCARE Association has been able to help out hundreds of people across the community.

"We donate several hundred Thanksgiving Day meals to the food pantry," Chambers said. "So the kids would meet us at the store, we would buy all the groceries load up our trucks and deliver it to the food pantry. This gave the kids a sense of why it's so important to donate and help others in need. But now that's not going to happen, I think that is one of the biggest travesties of all this destruction."

The organizers of the haunted house are now going to have to try to figure out some other way to raise the funds needed to help out local families.

"It's just a shame that a few people have ruined a really good thing that's helped a lot of people over the years," Chambers said. "We will press charges if the police can catch who did this. And our hope is that they get sentenced to community service so that they can see what they've done. Maybe they will see the people who are coming into to get their Thanksgiving Day meal from Crosswalk, and they're not going to be able to have it this year. Because of what the vandals did here over the weekend."

If you have any information about who is responsible for destroying the SCARE Association Haunted House on main street over the weekend, please call the West Frankfort Police Department at 618-937-3502

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