Just outside of Dayton, Ohio, in a town called Fairborn, is a place where October is eternal, candy is eaten with every meal and hyper-realistic animatronics are on standby, ready to scare the bejesus out of any brave soul willing to shell over three dollars. This magical place is Foy’s Halloween Stores — a series of related shops on main street U.S.A. that feels like walking straight onto the set of Disney’s Halloweentown.
The Foy’s conglomerate consists of six different locations, open year-round and specializing in every imaginable facet of the holiday. The centerpiece, of course, is the original Halloween Store, which was opened by Albert Foy in 1929. According to Michael, Albert’s grandson and third generation owner (his son will be the fourth), the founding Foy started out in the sweets business, baking by night and running his shop by day. Once he hit his 50s and was diagnosed with heart disease, that lifestyle began to take a toll.
Always the entrepreneur, the 55-year-old opened Foy’s five-and-dime “just four months before the stock market crashed,” Michael says. But it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the Foys would focus their attention on what their empire is famous for today. Michael says the acquisition of masks, Halloween-themed favors and party supplies started out slow, but the demand was there and the business kept growing. Nowadays, Fairborn’s Main Street is packed with people in town for Foy’s by mid-September.
“If we would have stayed a five-and-ten, we probably wouldn’t be in business (today),” Michael says.
By the ’80s, the five-and-dime was bursting with costumes and skeletons. The Foy family realized the only way to meet this newfound demand for all-things-spooky was to expand, leading to their second venture in 1989: the Adult Costume Store, which opened right next door. To protect the innocent from the shop’s sexier offerings, the Kid’s Costume Store opened soon after.
By the mid-’90s, a Haunted House Store, Glow Shop and a 1950s-style diner — the Rock-n-Roll Grill — completed the lineup.
It’s not hard to see why Michael felt the need to expand. The original shop is practically stocked floor-to-ceiling with an array of rubber masks, 10-cent toys, plastic body parts, vintage gags and even a rotating case of fake Area 51 IDs. In the Haunted House Store, an uncanny execution scene pulls out all the stops with a hooded figure strapped to an electric chair, violently convulsing as lights flash and screams flood the shop’s tiny back room.
Foy’s hasn’t strayed too far from its roots though, as evidenced by their worn wooden counter stacked high with glass jars of penny candy and a display window full of classic sweets, with photographs of all four generations of the Foy family taped to the front.
While Foy’s plays heavily into people’s nostalgia for what some might consider “simpler times,” some things have changed. For one, live monkeys no longer greet customers when they enter the shop. The family raised capuchins until their vet retired and a law that passed in 2013 made it illegal to own exotic pets in Ohio. The two eldest Foys are gone, too, though Michael swears he has heard footsteps and things moving around late at night — both at the shop and his grandmother’s house, which he purchased after she died for the purpose of decorating for Halloween.
His own house — a renovated church just off the main drag — boasts a full-scale horse-drawn hearse in the yard and a souped-up Ghostbusters hearse in the wrap-around driveway. Michael says they are two of seven hearses that he currently has in his collection, which he rolls out for the annual Fairborn Halloween Festival, held Oct. 18-20.
He suspects he’ll see a lot of clowns this year (because of the IT franchise and Joker) but says most of his staff will go all out with unique costumes they cobble together themselves. Ironically, when asked the age-old question, “What are you going to be for Halloween?” Michael said he wasn’t sure.
Foy’s Halloween Store is located at 18-20 E. Main St., Fairborn, Ohio. For more info, visit foyshalloweenstore.com/home.html.
This article appears in Oct 2-15, 2019.