Call it a station house of horrors!
Park Slope police scared the pants off thousands of local thrillseekers between Oct. 26 and Halloween, transforming the already-creepy basement of the 78th Precinct’s headquarters into a true vision of horror full of off-duty officers disguised as wicked ghouls and a room filled entirely with creepy clowns that were no laughing matter, according to one cop.
“Downstairs is really gory,” said Sgt. Angelo Pirozzi. “You get a good scare going down there.”
Several celebrity musical guests also haunted the spooky Sixth Avenue slammer, including Ramones drummer and Brooklyn resident Marky Ramone — who showed up on both Wednesday and Thursday to lurk in a coffin — and Misfits bassist Jerry Only, who signed autographs Sunday.
Ramone volunteered to join in after hearing about the event a few years back, Pirozzi said, then recruited fellow lover-of-morbid-music Only to join him.
“They’re into that horror punk stuff, so Halloween and all that stuff is pretty intriguing to them,” he said.
Attendees lined up around the block to get in to the spooky station house — Pirozzi estimates around 5,000 people passed through the precinct’s doors — and say the whole thing was frightfully good fun, with a scare truly lurking around every corner.
“When we first went in there, you have to turn a corner, but somebody was right there and popped and scared me,” said Brownsville mom Tashenna Staton, who brought her 3-year-old daughter Iara Rollins.
The 78th Precinct has a proud history of going all out for All Hallow’s Eve, but had stopped staging its haunted house in 2008. That all changed once Deputy Inspector Frank DiGiacomo took over as commanding officer and brought the tradition back from the dead last year, giving his charges free reign to design the haunted house of their dreams, according to Pirozzi.
“The new boss, he’s a big Halloween buff and he thought the haunted house was a fantastic idea,” Pirozzi said. “He gave his guys a lot leeway to build it out.”
