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Boney Island, a much-loved, homemade, skeleton-centric L.A. Halloween attraction for more than 20 years, will now be a ghost.
Creator Rick Polizzi — known to many for his 1996-2009 role as a producer of “The Simpsons” — announced on social media Monday that Boney Island is coming to an end.
The reason: A planned move to Santa Clarita has run into “unforeseen permitting and production challenges.” Polizzi said the county-wide slump in TV and film production is partially to blame.
After a string of venue changes, Polizzi said he was in talks to rent a set of soundstages at Santa Clarita Studios, and a large amount of Boney Island sets, props and other materials had already been moved to Santa Clarita.
“The Simpsons” producer Rick Polizzi built the treehouse, dubbed Boney Island, 24 years ago for his daughters. The city says it violates building permit requirements.
But several logistical challenges proved hard to solve, and one element was the studios’ decision to reduce their inventory of soundstages. As a result, Polizzi said, “the rug was kind of pulled out from under us.”
Santa Clarita Studios President Mike DeLorenzo said that this fall, the studio will let go of leases on three of its 35-plus soundstages. Of Boney Island, DeLorenzo said that “we truly wanted this to happen, but it just didn’t make sense financially.” By the tally of FilmLA, on-location production days for film and TV in greater Los Angeles fell by 46% from 2022 to 2025.
With no other remedies in sight, Polizzi and company put out word on Instagram and Facebook, saying that after carefully considering locations, city permitting costs and storage, “we have made the difficult decision to officially bring Boney Island to an end” and sell the collection.
Reaction was quick, sad and peppered with family memories. “Thank you for creating so much magic for my family as well as so many others,” wrote one admirer on Instagram. “My kids and myself will forever walk around in a squeaky voice reciting: “Help meeee…I feeel like a yo-yo.”
Boney Island, a playful homage to Coney Island, was born in the late 1990s when Polizzi set out to build a Halloween attraction in his Sherman Oaks front yard for his family and neighbors. He was joined by “Aqua Dazzle” owner Rex Danyluk and friends as they designed an immersive, imaginative experience without a haunted house, a maze or jump scares. Instead it featured cavorting skeletons, magic acts and water shows.
“It’s not all the gore and horror stuff that everything else is,” Polizzi said. “I started it for my daughters.”
Eventually, the yard’s tall treehouse and growing crowds each Halloween led to permit disputes and the prospect of criminal charges.
“We were a victim of our own success, because it got so crowded we had to hire traffic control,” Polizzi told Spectrum News in 2025, adding that “one neighbor across the street always hated it.” Polizzi estimated that he’d spend more than $50,000 trying to get proper city approvals before dismantling the treehouse in 2025.