But additional code requirements have driven a stake through its owner’s ambition to admit the public.

In the spring, Pam Apkarian-Russell convinced the city Code Appeals Board to grant an “occupancy load” exception that allowed her to avoid frightfully expensive alterations that included the addition of accessible restroom facilities.

She succeeded despite a code officer’s argument that doing so risked “potential catastrophe” — given the museum’s 40,000 items, including plenty of flammable ones.

Apkarian-Russell successfully argued the overwhelming number of fragile artifacts filling the rooms forced her into limiting visits to small groups by appointment only, ushered through by herself.

Mirror photo by J.D. Cavrich Kevin Suckling and Louise Burkholder, self-identified “cultural tourists,” stand in front of the Halloween museum on Broad Avenue. Suckling and Burkholder testified on behalf of museum owner Pam Apkarian-Russell at a code hearing.

“When I am giving a tour, I don’t go walking off letting them do what they bloody well feel like,” she told the board.

The board reduced the occupancy load requirements from one designed to accommodate 101 people to one designed to accommodate 49.

But recently, Apkarian-Russell discovered that it would still cost $30,000 to comply with remaining requirements that include lighted exit signs, because those requirements triggered the need for a major electrical upgrade.

“It does not make sense for me to put out another $30,000, which I don’t have, when I only ask $10 admission and take only six people at a time on two tours a day,” Apkarian-Russell said. “So I will just stay private.”

As a private museum, the castle will open only to patrons, friends and researchers, she said.

“Unless something amazing comes through money-wise,” she said. “And that’s not going to happen.”

“It’s not an unusual story,” said Code Appeals Board member Dave Albright, an architect, of the requirements that seem to have buried Apkarian-Russell’s hopes.

The code for existing buildings provides “a lot of deference” for current conditions — but not so much on matters of safety, especially when a building moves into the “assembly occupancy” category, Albright said.

The museum came to Altoona from Benwood, W.Va., a suburb of Wheeling, where Apkarian-Russell had founded it 11 years ago.

She left there because of increasing impingement from a coal mine and gas fracking.

She came to the Broad Avenue mansion at the suggestion of a couple who live near it — Kevin Suckling and Louise Burkholder, self-identified as “cultural tourists,” who testified on Apkarian-Russell’s behalf at the code hearing.

At that hearing, Apkarian-Russell, who calls herself the “Halloween Queen,” was pale, her hair dyed green in front and dark in back, glasses perched on top of her head, and had red earrings and a motley sweater.

Her husband, Chris Russell, sat quietly.

The Castle Museum could be a “cultural and historical treasure” for Altoona, helping to make the city a place “that someone young would want to come to,” Burkholder told the board.

It would be a “quirky” attraction, the kind the local tourism bureau likes to promote, said Judy Coutts, an architect who represented Apkarian-Russell at the hearing.

Apkarian-Russell has written books, given talks all over the country and appeared on the BBC and with Martha Stewart, she told the board.

She’s a native of Worcester, Mass.

As a New England girl, she loved autumn — the colors, the wood smoke, the apples ripening, she said, while giving a reporter a tour of the museum.

She especially loved the first of the two quintessential autumn holidays — for the fun of it, the fantasy.

She also loves history, and began collecting things related to the paranormal, including the Salem witch trials.

In the museum, the most dramatic exhibits are dark, gnarly, but luxuriant — sinuous and twisted, like a roller coaster made of wires in the big front room.

There are gigantic exhibits and tiny ones, items exposed to the air, items under glass and items piled in drawers. There are costly things, cheap things you probably couldn’t give away, artful things, kitschy things.

There are items of umber, articles of ocher, pieces of orange.

There are witches and goblins and pumpkins and ghosts.

It is somber and whimsical and aromatic and garish.

It is very full.

“It’s great stuff,” said John Plouse, the codes supervisor who argued against Apkarian-Russell at the code hearing.

“Eye candy,” Apkarian-Russell called it, at one point.

But the general public won’t get a taste, for now, at least.

“It’s a great disappointment,” Apkarian-Russell said.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.