Foy's Halloween Store in the sensationally spooky vintage experience you deserve to have
Foy's Halloween Store in the sensationally spooky vintage experience you deserve to have
Foy's in Fairborn, Ohio, started as a humble five and dime before morphing into an epic Halloween emporium that dominates the downtown and surrounding streets
Welcome to Halloweentown, USA!
No, we are not in Salem, Massachusetts, or Sleepy Hollow, New York, though for their own spooky reasons, these places among others qualify for the title.
No, friends, we are in Fairborn, a small city just outside Dayton, Ohio, where the tell-tale heart of the Foy’s Halloween Store empire beats downtown.
In storefront after jam-packed Main Street storefront – seven stores in all – Mike Foy oversees a family emporium that is the stuff of dreams (or, well, the fuel for nightmares) for Halloween enthusiasts.
In these stores, you’ll find masks of all kinds, costumes for all ages, enough treats to make sure no tricks are played on you, a haunted-house store with everything you might need to make your own, and on and on it ghouls – uhh, goes.
I love Halloween, and I was drowning in it here when I visited a couple of weeks ago. I was incredibly happy to lose myself in Foy’s.
It all began in 1929, when Albert Foy, Mike’s grandfather, opened a five-and-dime store here, a downtown staple of 20th-century America.
But over the years, the Foys slowly were bewitched by Halloween, and the business grew along with demand every year, especially as Halloween increasingly became a holiday for the over-18 set.
Foy told WYSO Radio’s Renee Wilde he’s been coming in since he was a toddler – and he’s never left!
“I’ve only lived within two blocks of the store my whole life. I’ve never gone any farther. This is where I’ve been my whole life, and where my dad was from [age] 7 until he died.”
Beyond what Foy sells, he also creates. He owns a fleet of hearses and has such elaborate decorations he’s bought empty lots and uses old family houses around town to display his terrifying tableaus. Townsfolk get into it, as well.
Indeed, the spirit of Halloween, Foy’s style, is contagious – the business has attracted other quirky shops to Fairborn, turning the city, the Columbus Monthly explains, into a “bastion for nerds, outcasts and the curious.”
It doesn’t hurt that the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is nearby, with its “alien autopsy/Project Blue Book” lore.
Give Mike Foy a call and the “Halloween” theme plays, WYSO reports.
His stores feature Halloween decorations on the facade, the sidewalk, the roofline. (The crucified scarecrows are impossible to forget.)
But outside the original store you still see a humble reminder of how it all began – a neon sign saying “five and dime,” and part of that store is a time capsule of the days of Woolworth and Ben Franklin. It’s not JUST Halloween stuff, if you explore all the aisles.
Most of those five and dimes of yore are gone and this one might be gone, too, were it not for Foy’s love of his family, his town, and a certain holiday we are celebrating today.
“Halloween saved this store,” he told WYSO.
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