Jeremy Prendergast remembers the first time he truly experienced Halloween in a Chicago suburb in 2016.
“My wife wanted to go out to her parents’ subdivision in (Naperville’s) Century Hill and go trick-or-treating. And I was like, ‘Why are we going all the way over there?’” the 48-year-old said, noting that they were living in a condo across the street from Naperville North High School at the time.
When he got to the neighborhood, the Massachusetts native understood why.
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“It was insane,” Prendergast said. “The amount of decorations that were up, people had all these little creative things going on, little hidden tricks and stuff. One guy was in a gorilla suit.”
That experience inspired Prendergast and his wife to do something fun themselves when they had a house of their own.
What started with just one fog machine and a ghost hanging in a garage in 2018 is now a major Halloween operation for the Prendergast family, complete with eight fog machines, a green laser vortex tunnel and a spider trick they play on visitors.
He has dubbed the experience The Fog Bog: a smoky Halloween yard display reminiscent of a swamp with a thick mist.
Located at 225 Ridgefield Lane, it has attracted hundreds of visitors from both Naperville and across the suburbs.
“When I’m out there working on The Fog Bog, people will stop their car and they’ll get out and they’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m so-and-so. I live down the street. That’s my house over there,’” Prendergast said.
Some neighbors step in to help with the construction needed to bring the bog to life.
“It’s kind of just like a sense of community with this neighborhood, that we all kind of rally around it,” Prendergast said. “We have a big pizza party on opening night. (There was) probably like 50 people there this time, and all the kids are running around and it was cool.”
After their first Halloween display in 2018, Prendergast decided he wanted to go bigger. In 2019, he started using dry ice to help manipulate the fog.
“If you take dry ice and if you can let the fog, as it comes out of the machine, go through a cooler filled with dry ice … it stays closer to the ground,” Prendergast said. “Then you kind of get that creepy, swampy effect.”
When the family found themselves spending $100 a night on dry ice, they bought a new machine that created the same effect, he said. When 2020 rolled around, they acquired more fog machines and, because of the pandemic, they had a little more free time to make the decorations even more elaborate.
“We built that whole (house) facade out of Styrofoam and quarter-inch plywood sheathing and two-by-threes,” Prendergast said. “We added some machines that do like a scissor arm that comes out, and all these pneumatic prop controllers. We have six of them right now, plus a chimney controller, where you can control the smoke coming out of the chimney.”
The decorations have gotten bigger and bigger every year.
This year, they’re doing a “Ghostbusters” theme to accompany the fog. The scene is full of Slimer ghosts, mannequins dressed in proton packs and two inflatable Stay Puft Marshmallow Men.
“We have the table. We call it the magic table,” Prendergast said, referring to the scene in the first movie when Dana comes home from the store to find her groceries have taken a demonic turn.
“We have the grocery bag, we have a carton of fake eggs, and then we have three fried eggs on the table that are fake as well, and then a bag of Stay Puft marshmallows sitting there,” Prendergast said.
The magic happens with the push of a button, which any visitor can touch.
“So when you push the button, it lifts the table towards you, so you can see what’s on the table. And then right after it goes up, there’s a little air blaster underneath the curtain, and it shoots the curtain out at you in a safe manner,” he said.
And if that wasn’t enough, Prendergast also has a spider trick he and his family pull on visitors. As people turn the corner to see the house or as they walk through the laser vortex, he communicates with his two daughters via walkie-talkie to drop a giant spider in front of them.
Some people scream when the spider falls in front of them. Others are tickled by it.
“Whoa, that’s pretty cool,” Jean Karels said as a spider fell in front of her one Friday night. The 62-year-old drove out from Joliet to check out the display.
Frightening decorations aren’t all the home has to offer. The Fog Bog is partnering with “A Pint for Kim” to help raise awareness on the importance of donating blood. The campaign was started in honor of Kimberley Benedyk Sandford
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, a Naperville mother who died from cancer.Prendergast is also hosting a fundraiser for the American Red Cross called “Fog-It-Forward.”