About 150 students from Eliot Arts Magnet School, dressed in tattered clothing, dark makeup and suitably frightening costumes, took over the street outside the Altadena Sheriff’s Station for a flash mob performance of a Michael Jackson “Thriller” mashup.
They twisted, lurched and stomped in unison as hundreds of spectators crowded around them, phones raised to capture the spectacle.
But beneath the theatrical makeup was a story of a community still finding its footing after the devastating Eaton Fire.
The students, under the direction of Billy Rough, had traditionally performed a version of the famous dance each year. That tradition was interrupted when the January 2025 fire destroyed their school campus.
Rough said the students had been unable to perform the number since the fire. An invitation to participate in Saturday’s Haunted Jail celebration finally brought the tradition back.
The event itself grew from a similar desire to restore something familiar.
Altadena Sheriff’s Station Capt. Ethan Marquez said he conceived the Halloween celebration after realizing how many children had lost not only their homes, but also the neighborhoods where they once went trick-or-treating.
“After the fires, a lot of people lost their homes, obviously, but the kids had no place to go trick or treat,” Marquez said. “We thought this was a great way to share a station with the community, bring kids out and give them a safe place to trick or treat.”
The event transformed the station grounds into a Halloween attraction, complete with a haunted jail, towering skeletons, colorful lighting, decorated tents and crowds of costumed families collecting candy.
The haunted station itself? Well, lots of screaming in the usually quiet halls of the station, as kids and parents negotiated their way through the maze of lights and fog and skeletons. Marquez said between 25 and 50 people helped organize the event, following months of planning meetings.
Among the volunteers were residents who had once created haunted houses in their own neighborhoods before losing their homes in the fire.
“A lot of people from the community that lost their homes that used to put on haunted houses in the community, now they’re helping us put this one on for the rest of the community,” Marquez said.
It was an evening of deliberate make-believe in a community that has endured enough real-life horror.
And when the young zombies gathered beneath the streetlights, moving together to the familiar rhythms of “Thriller,” the performance became something more than a Halloween spectacle.
For a few minutes, a school tradition interrupted by disaster was alive again.
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