Hearse Castle : For the Count and Countess Von Dreck, Every Day Is Halloween

Strange. Eyebrows didn’t go up when an ominous-looking hearse pulled to a stop at a Hollywood Hills house and two figures dressed in black stepped out.

“I said, ‘Hey, Fred, getting ready for Halloween?’ ” remembers neighbor John Bell. “He said, ‘Well, you know me--it’s Halloween all year round.’ ”

With a wave, the couple known to neighbors as Count and Countess Von Dreck hurried into the home on Rinconia Drive where the calendar always reads Oct. 31.

The walls are painted black and decorated with portraits of Dracula and Vampira. Mock gravestones stand in the corner. The deer head mounted over the living room fireplace is antlers and bone.

Their coffee table is a coffin-shaped slab of glass resting upon a pair of stone gargoyles. Atop it is a dead lizard preserved in a glass container of formaldehyde and a human skull acquired from a medical supply house.

Every inch of the house is crammed with replicas of ghouls and goblins--from the shelf near the front door, where an animated figure of a gravedigger waves a tiny lantern, to the kitchen, where a lamp glows through a shade made from X-rays of human ribs.

Bookcases hold videotapes of more than 500 horror movies and dozens of toy Godzillas, plastic mummies and mechanical Frankenstein monsters.

The 44-year-old Von Drecks are big-time, full-time horror fans.

“People are always trying to figure us out,” the Count says. “But this is art for us. This is really a huge playground for us.”

Adds the Countess: “We’re not into the occult or anything like that. . . . I don’t even believe in ghosts.”

In fact, Fred and Grace Kish say, the scariest thing that has ever happened to them was realizing this year that it was time to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.

The daughter of a Marine captain and the son of a Washington firefighter, the pair are former high school sweethearts from Woodbridge, Va., who met in church and had their first date at a sock hop. On their second one they took in a horror movie.

They adopted their Count and Countess personas after moving to Los Angeles 14 years ago and happily discovering it is home to plenty of monster movie fans.

Settling in Reseda, the pair formed a band called “Blood Count.” In his spare time from working in landscaping and construction, Kish began photographing local cemetery markers.

Soon, they were dressing entirely in black and driving a black Trans Am with the license “2 VAMPYRS” (they bought their 1963 Cadillac hearse last year after moving to Hollywood). They launched a Saturday night public access show, “Tombstone Alley,” on Century Cable.

“In the middle of the nice, suburban Valley was the Addams Family,” laughs the Countess.

“It was like growing up in ‘The Munsters,’ ” agrees daughter Jessica Kish, 23, now a North Hollywood legal secretary.

“People in the Valley always stared. When we were younger it was kind of hard--they’d drive us to school and the kids would look at them and say, ‘Oh, my God!’ When we got older, though, our friends thought our parents were really cool. They wanted to hang out with them more than with us. I had a slumber party and the girls thought it was so great--they all wanted parents like that.”

Gabriel Kish, a 21-year-old heating and air conditioning installer and college student who lives in a Hollywood apartment, says: “Growing up in our house was never dull. I think being in a regular house would have been boring.”

The family still celebrates Christmas together around a lovingly trimmed tree. Instead of tinsel, however, it is decorated with bats, skeletons and strings of miniature skull lights. Once, Gabriel put polished coyote bones under the tree for his mother.

“What a wonderful Christmas present! My son is such a good gift giver,” exclaimed the Countess, who proudly displays the bones next to a Bela Lugosi death mask and Edgar Allan Poe books.

There can be a downside to celebrating Halloween year round, of course.

For one, the pair can’t keep a housekeeper. Maids drop the dust cloth and flee when they get to the Vampire Repellent Kit near the front window. It is a velvet-lined wooden box containing a tiny wooden stake, a shiny cross and a vial of make-believe “holy water.”

For another, neighbors sometimes complain about the music coming from their house. “It’s like a tape loop of a dirge,” said neighbor Jim Maxwell.

And when their white cat named Zombie or their black Labrador named Beelzebub get too close to motion-activated monster dolls scattered around the house, the quiet is shattered by the sudden sound of digitally recorded screams and werewolf howls.

Oddly, the Count and Countess won’t be home to greet trick-or-treaters this year. They have parlayed their look into paid guest appearances at events such as horror magazine and tattooers conventions and they will be attending one such gathering Tuesday in New Orleans.

No matter. Children rarely knock on the Von Dreck door on Halloween, anyway.

“I guess they’re scared to come to our house,” the Count said sadly.