A local Halloween haunt is headed to the other side 13 years after its first screams, but fear monger Larry Belair isn’t nailing the lid on the coffin just yet.

Larry Belair, owner of Victorian Park, said the decision to shutter Haunted Mansion indefinitely came in the face of stiff competition from nearby Canobie Lake Park’s Screeemfest and Spookyworld in Litchfield. But he might reopen if a niche materializes.

After taking last year off, Belair found he enjoyed shriekless October nights more than being the master of mayhem at the mansion.

“My wife and I are 70 years old, and there comes a point where after cold nights and long days you just begin to say ‘perhaps we’ve had enough.’ That’s part of the equation: our age and where we are in life, and it’s sort of bittersweet,” Belair said. “The older I get and the colder it gets, the more I appreciate how much work we put into making it work.”

The “Belair witch project” was spawned 15 years ago after he attended an International Amusement Parks and Attractions conference. Belair realized his mini-golf course on Route 28 would make a fine haunted house post season.

In its heyday, roughly 45 actors terrorized park patrons on any given night in the weeks leading up to Halloween, Belair said. Over the years, more than 150,000 people survived his Forbidden Forest and Victorian mansion all told, he said.

For the show, Belair teamed up with John Henry, who fell into the business of bringing nightmares to life after putting on haunted houses for fundraisers for local nonprofit groups in his spare time. This Halloween marks only the third year in two decades that Henry won’t be inspiring goosebumps.

“I haven’t moved on yet,” he said. “It just grew, it snowballed, it mushroomed and it got better and I realized I really love it. Even on the years I have not done one … in two of those I have done something for the neighborhood kids.”

What lured people back year after year was the quality of the production, Henry said. Design work began in August, and in September, the haunted house would come to life. The next few weeks would be a blur of late nights and good shows, he said.

The phone still rings with happy customers asking if the attraction will reopen, Belair said. He hasn’t ruled out bringing the mansion back to life, but it depends largely on if he can compete in a market crowded with big players.

“This year we’re watching ... whether or not (Screeemfest) is as successful in its second year as its first, and whether there is still life in the market and whether we should be thinking about reinventing ourselves and offer sort of a niche market Halloween event,” Belair said.

Still, just as Belair has concluded, there’s something to be said for spending chilly October nights at home, said Henry, operations manager with the Bedford-based Expert Server Group.

“It became a burden to the family because you’re a passing ship in the night,” he said. “I’m going to sit back, enjoy the family and have some pumpkin pie, and see what happens.”