- December 4, 2025
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Hay rides, crafts by local artisans, food, and carnival games are some offerings to be found at Fruitville Grove Pumpkin Festival, a beloved fall event in Sarasota.
Yet as of last year, the event also offered a high-tech side — with a new addition — Hollowgraves Haunted Manor.
In this walkthrough haunted house experience, animatronic characters outnumber live actors, and rooms are bedecked with wallpaper, furnishings and other detail.
It may seem like the stuff of an amusement park, and indeed, the attraction brings a history from the seaside parks of New Jersey.
Yet this haunted house isn’t a corporate property; it’s the dedicated vision of one Englewood resident, carried out across 34 years, and still in progress.
Stan Ambro is, reluctantly by his own admission, a master plumber and HVAC contractor, but for his whole life, he’s been trying to explore his passion — the theme and amusement park business.
When he first “caught the bug,” as he stated, he was a child visiting Wildwood, New Jersey.
That was where he first encountered the work of his hero, Bill Tracy, one of the best-known designers of dark rides (rides that tell stories through specially lit scenes) from the 1960s to the 1970s.
Many of Tracy’s attractions are now demolished, but Ambro has dreams of building new versions of some of Tracy's rides, specifically a pirate ship and a mine cart roller coaster.
When he was young, Ambro made an observation about Halloween: that trick-or-treating brought an audience to the house.
By age 12, he was creating Halloween experiences in his mother’s yard, which he says became three-night events that drew people from around the neighborhood.
At first, he says, he thinks the town appreciated the project, as it kept neighborhood kids away from mischief.
“It pretty much put an end to that in the neighborhood, because they had something to do, but then it got so big that they had to stop it, because it was insane,” he said. “We had so many people parking on people’s lawns.”
That, he says, was when the town building inspector told him that he should build the attraction out of trailers, so it could be taken somewhere appropriate.
In 1990, when he was about 19 or 20, he purchased a set of trailers from a freight company in New York City. By next year, in a park for tractor trailers, he was cutting into them, shaping them into a walkthrough experience.
Fortunately, the skills of his trades, including his knowledge of carpentry and electrical work, provided Ambro with the tools he needed to build something that made its way into the world of amusement parks.
Although the house was meant for Wildwood Amusement Park, the plans never came to fruition, and instead his first showing was at Gingerbread Castle in Hamburg, with other showings of note including four alternating stays between Funtown Pier in Seaside Heights and Keansburg Amusement Park.
During the attraction's second time at Seaside Heights, Hurricane Sandy swept through New Jersey in 2012, destroying many seaside attractions but sparing the haunted house, which returned to Keansburg, where it remained for the next 10 years.
But after moving to Englewood with his family and being unable to properly maintain the attraction, Ambro needed somewhere closer to home to keep his creation.
With the help of a friend in New Jersey, the trailers were loaded for Fruitville Grove.
Before the 1,500 square-foot space could open in Sarasota, many features had to be repaired, although the trailers withstood the hurricanes that impacted the area in 2024.
Fortunately, the preparatory work was just complete enough for the attraction to open for the Pumpkin Festival. Ambro says it’s still a work in progress.
That includes the animatronic figure of a prisoner Ambro is currently working on, which he says he's been trying to include for 20 years. He says it will serve the role of scaring guests in the back of a group, rather than the ones in the front.
Right now, his major goal is for the attraction to be able to be open throughout the year.
Currently, it is only allowed to open for eight days a year during the Pumpkin Festival, with the farm's temporary use permit.
Fruitville Grove's owner Kim White says the farm will have to see what happens in the future, although at this point the eight days are all that are permitted.
"I'm sure it would be fun to have that for the community more often," she said.
She also said with new generations becoming involved with the farm and bringing all hands on deck, it’s possible that an additional festival could be added in the future.
Visitors to the attraction will find the accumulation of years of work.
“Everything in here is a labor of Stan’s love,” says Ambro’s wife, Missy Ambro.
However, the family lends a helping hand, including Missy, who works on those aspects Stan says he doesn’t have the patience for.
“She's always been more than supportive," he said, noting her help with needs like the fine details of painting.
"She dry brushes—makes things look old that are new," he said.
His son Michael Ambro, 15, is also highly involved.
“Michael has been a really big part of it,” he said. “He drives me to come, like, ‘Dad you going?… and I need that because I’m just so occupied with everyday life.”
He also has two other children, Nicholas Ambro, 19, and Valerie Ambro, 15.
Other than the animatronics, most of the decorations are items the family accumulated over the years.
That includes antique lights from a garage sale in New Jersey; a candelabra that was set to be discarded by The Brownstone banquet hall in Patterson, New Jersey, and an antique fireplace from Missy Ambro’s old house.
Many items come from customers’ homes, especially from the boiler rooms of Stan Ambro's past New Jersey customers.
“For whatever reason, when they don’t know what to do with something, they put it down by the boiler…” Stan Ambro said. “You see something very unique, old picture frames or candelabras or lighting fixtures… Many times people were just glad to hear it was going to go to somewhere that people would appreciate.”
Although not directly on display, guiding a sliding bookcase is a door-opening mechanism formerly used at a ShopRite supermarket in New Jersey.
However, the animatronics are a slightly different story.
Ambro wasn't much of a traveler, he says, but after he married Missy Ambro and they visited Walt Disney World and haunted houses in Salem, Massachussetts, he became convinced he had to recreate what he saw.
“We went to Disney, and the Carousel of Progress really woke me up,” Ambro said. “It was like, ‘Whoa.’ That was very sort of inspirational… I was never one to not do something, like if it was something I wanted to make, I recreated it.”
Also, although his haunted house had started off with paid actors, Ambro says this made it difficult to turn a profit, so he wanted to introduce automated actors.
The walkthrough experience is now populated with various animated skeleton figures, which he built in a basement office.
The first one he created was a bartender, which incorporated a ribcage he had made at age 17 using papier-mâché and welded coat hangers.
It took about three months to develop it to the point that the eyes and neck moved to his satisfaction.
The bones of the skeletons are sourced from a company that manufactures models of anatomical features.
Ambro says he was able to convince the company to sell a second tier of its products that included imperfect items that can't be used for the medical study for which they are intended.
The skulls are a Halloween item that was once sold in stores.
Ambro infuses the metallic skeletons of the animatronics into the insides of the bones, although in the future, he hopes to create the bones from the metal.
The robot's movements are powered using motors and pneumatics, or the release of compressed air, although Ambro says he would like to incorporate the smoother hydraulic-based movements like those seen in many Disney animatronics.
Stan Ambro may be a plumber and an HVAC contractor by trade, but he doesn't define himself by that.
“It is an art,” Ambro said. “I never wanted to admit that I was an artist before, but I have to say, over the years and growing up enough, to say, ‘Yes, I'm an artist.”
