The crown jewel of LEGO Monster Fighters, and an enduring holy grail for collectors, is the Monster Fighters set 10228, the Haunted House. But I didn't love it.
The set as designed was beloved for its fully-enclosed structure and unique haunted atmosphere, and the house is held as a classic and much-desired LEGO model and it's prime for display.
The Haunted House is a villains-only set with no hint of the Monster Fighters theme's central conflict. No heroes are present. It's a detailed weathered spooky building in the classic Victorian mansion mold per Alfred Hitchcock's non-supernatural horror film Psycho, and is often warmly compared to LEGO's perpetual "Modular Buildings" theme in terms of its design quality, though its format is different. Modular Buildings are designed to display in a street configuration on baseplates with sidewalks and connections to other buildings in the line to line them in rows and corners, and interior access is done with removable floors giving top-down views into each story. The Haunted House is designed to be isolated and will not connect to Modular Buildings, and it's built in "dollhouse" style with a hinge opening the house from the side for a cross-section view of the interior--the open sides of the house are uneven, with the split further than halfway down the middle, resulting in the front half of the house being deeper than the back half.
My relationship with the set is a bit iffy. I believe I got it as a Christmas present, and I built it and enjoyed it, as well as the exclusive zombie staff minifigures within, but I wasn't sure I liked the hinged dollhouse nature of the building, and its furnishings frankly left much to be desired. There were periods where I experimented with interiors inspired both by Disney's The Haunted Mansion rides and consumer animatronic props. I eventually left it dormant for years until I decided to take it apart with the goal of rebuilding it. At the time, I had some custom-assembled spooky characters I thought would suit a recolor of the house with all of its Sand Green pieces swapped for white, but that never ended up happening. Then, coming to now, I thought dark red would be the right color for the house instead, to slightly de-Monster Fighters it as a place to display Minifigures and Build-a-Minifigure monsters as a dynamic display hub. For all my obsession with LEGO's Sand Green color, I never ended up liking it for the house. I also wanted to add a modular-style ability to separate the floors so I could plan and view them from a cohesive top-down view as well.
This project was a massive effort. I'd kept the printed instructions for the set, which made it vastly easier to inventory and cross off the parts I needed, which got assembled into a designated box for when I needed to rebuild the house. This process of inventory hunting led to a whole other project of reorganizing my parts bins by functional type instead of by color as I'd had it before, since I realized it would be more useful to me that way, and I eventually parted together the things I needed. I noted which parts I needed to get a few more of, and all of the parts which needed to be acquired in Dark Red. I didn't bother assembling parts I knew would be for the detached front gate build, since that was never worthwhile to me.
Genuinely thank goodness for BrickLink. While LEGO offers its own parts-ordering service, the parts on offer are the parts being produced for current sets, so it's limited inventory. BrickLink lets you find parts and select minimum quantity so you can find the seller who actually has the amount of X or Y part you need. International shipping times and purchase minimums and seller cancellation (because shipping into this country is so discouraged right now, even on the individual level) make it much harder to find the right seller, though. Multiple orders were cancelled because the international sales situation is such a fiasco, and I quickly learned not to even bother ordering from abroad. God bless America.
The only piece I wasn't feasibly able to source in Dark Red were the fifteen 1x1x5 (1x1 footprint, 5 bricks tall) pieces, so I made the substitution to order 75 more 1x1 bricks to stack up into the five-high pillars in their place.
Otherwise, I would have had to source from international sellers I couldn't expect to be able to fulfill the orders because of where I live, or sellers had purchase minimums I didn't want to play to. I did buy from some sellers with minimums, though, sourcing some other fun parts and figures unrelated to the project, and I learned to not be so annoyed with the minimum limit because at a certain point, getting more parts under the same shipping cost is a much fairer deal. I spaced apart my two orders of the 1x1 bricks to spare myself some counting, allowing the 1x1s package replacing the 1x1s of the offical set to come first so I could set that aside, then got the 1x1s to replace the 1x1x5s.
I started building what I could of the bottom floor--the stages before the colored wall bricks came in. My first physical changes to the build came with the fireplace. In the original set, the fireplace is built on a hinge so that when the dollhouse halves of the building open, the fireplace can lie flat against the unfolded chimney between the open halves of the house so it's not disconnected from the chimney in the visual logic of the unfolded house.
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| Front hall, kitchen on first floor. Writing desk and bedroom on second floor. Attic third floor. |
It was awkward, though, because when the house was closed, the hinge placed the fireplace totally to the side of those light grey floor tiles it seemed were meant to sit under it, with the fireplace not sitting on the middle of the line where the house split. If I was making changes to allow the house to display from top-down open views, that needed to change. I fiddled with pieces until I realized the only solution was a fully detached fireplace with two separate attachment options for open and closed house. For the closed house layout, I put one stud into the tile mat under the fireplace (and later changed the shape of the mat) so the fireplace could sit secure without locking the house closed and preventing it from opening.
To attach the fireplace to the unfolded chimney, I built a 1x1 Technic brick into the back and put a 1x1 brick with a stud on the side (visible in the first of the two preceding photos) in place so the hole in the fireplace brick would attach to the 1x1.
When the chimney is closed up, the 1x1 brick with the stud nests into a 1x1 corner panel piece so the stud isn't in the way of anything.
This later brought another tweak. I had forgotten about the protruding hinge bricks above the fireplace, which prevented the piece from laying flat against the unfolded chimney, so I need to use a 1x2x2 panel brick, which creates a hollow space that 2 1x2 full bricks wouldn't, so the hinge could tuck in. The set as designed had that panel in the fireplace for that purpose, but I forgot the panel was necesssary to the fireplace gimmick and used solid bricks before realizing my error.
I also altered the design of the fireplace a little, removing the grate and internals so I could put in a jumper tile and some embers and flames. I want Mr. Fireplace, my custom smoky flame ghost character, to be placed emerging from here. I also replaced the ship-in-a-bottle display on the mantel with a marble bust from the Muppets minifigure series--a spookier feature than LEGO provided.
I also endeavored to plate up the floor with patterning. The official set design has very basic grey flooring from the foundation plates, with a few tiles for broken stone and floorboards, as well as an inexplicable pair of half-hexagon plates on the floor that don't do anything aesthetically positive. I wanted a more lively look, and set to constructing a checkerboard plate pattern for the floor, as well as a smaller check pattern for the kitchen area, sectioned off. Since the fireplace mat goes across both halves of the house, I brought the larger living room tiles all the way around the mat, but got the kitchen section a workable size, broken off by a tile outline. The majority of it is studded surface. I don't like using too much tile for interiors because it limits the placement of figures and furniture in its ways by reducing the spots where things can attach. The advantage of scattered isolated studs is that things can rotate on their placement in a way they can't on a fully-studded grid, but I'll take my chances.
While the house is limited space, I realized I needed to push the kitchen back a little so there was slightly more reasonable space to put oneself in front of the fireplace. I also started planning ideas for a pillar and trim at the top of the kitchen area so it would be more elegantly marked as its own space in this open plan.
I then considered the space outside. The Haunted House is built onto dark grey plates that closely hug the house itself, but it doesn't look like earth or grounds, and I wanted more space outside the house for foliage and minifigure display, so I plated over the grey with dark tan for dead grass, and also added some plated area around the edges, done with plates holding them onto the prebuilt section over the top since I couldn't change the footprint of the house at a base level at this point.
This made a more finished display, and every bit of minifigure-compatible square studdage will help.
I then tried expanding to the other side to add a small graveyard...
...but this looked awkward to me and I tried again with a more symmetrical and wider new expansion, leaving space for the house's back half to fully unfold flush against the new plates.
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| Oh, yeah. That's maximized. The corner above the cemetery fence here is filled perfectly by the back of the house when it fully opens. |
I kept working at the fence and tried out a tree, built around the (sticker-decorated) evil tree half-cylinder brick from the Mystery Machine Scooby-Doo set. I ultimately didn't keep this tree base.
I decided to edit the bricks on the border of the house thus far to add a clip-and-bar connection with two bricks that interlock so the house stays closed and folded when I want it to. The build will become sturdier when there are more layers of house and hinges, but having the ability to gently lock the house closed is nice.
This ultimately didn't make it any sturdier to carry, and expanding the grounds definitely made the house harder to move. Deciding to modify it with separating floors was actually a godsend for transporting the house, since moving it in pieces was a viable strategy. I might revise this build further in the future to have the ground floor of the house as a detachable piece from the baseplate too, rather than the base being built partly on top of the house's foundation.
I re-reworked the fence to make it look like stone instead of iron so I could use the pieces to trim the roof of the Creator house, and also pushed the gate section a little further back with another extension of the base.
I added a shed in the back of the cemetery. My first try was not an opening cabinet for minifigure use; it was a glorified storage chute in which I tidily stacked the legs of my Series 1 Zombie variants so the zombies can be displayed torso-only in the ground nearby as if digging themselves out. The shed roof is mounted on two studs so it comes off and I can grab the legs (stacked to each other) by the pegs.
If there's only one pair of legs in there or they disconnect and the lower pair is stuck inside, the whole shed was made to come off the baseplate from a one-stud connection if I needed to invert it and shake the legs out.
I later reworked the shed altogether. I'd done it the first way way because I didn't think the doors and frames I had suited a shed like this, and I wanted the legs hidden, until I realized I could build a shed with an opening door by keeping the pieces on the floor in the portion of the door below the window.
The pair of legs in the back is loose, but the one in front is attached by a single stud to keep them tidy inside rather than rattling around.
Then I finally got the last of the Dark Red pieces I needed to commence the actual core rebuild of the house. I had to rework a few things--there needed to be a stud directly above the bar-clip "keep the house closed" connection I built into the sides, so I finagled a small solution there so the rest of the build would work.
The first floor also has long beams of brown plates crossing both halves of the floor, which interfered with my plan to frame off the kitchen area with its own overhead beam, so I replaced the wedge bricks the beams attached to with 1x1s and took the beams out. I kept the equivalent beams on the upper two floors, though. I ultimately didn't end up using all of the dark red bricks after modifications, but you need to build a LEGO model fully before you understand what changes you want, so it was worth it to get all of the bricks.
One of the more memorable features is the columns on the porch, which are topped by zombie heads officially, in a disgusting, ghastly manner. I replaced them with skulls which suited a more all-purpose house and made more logical sense. I remember the pillar pieces being wobbly and extremely fiddly to align to the black plates on top of them before, enough to dread this portion of the build, but I found it very easy this time around, just pressing the plates onto the stable studs on the bricks in the back first and then maneuvering the floating pillar parts into place under the plates.
Managing the modular floors was its own task. Some sections of the house are more built together officially, so I needed to find ways to detach them so they weren't part of the floor that could lift away. The balcony over the front porch and the awning on the back door were separated from the second floor as such. To separate the floors, I laid out the plates that form the shape and then put rows of plates underneath to lock them in shape as a stable base to build on and remove from the rest of the house.
I used the same method of floor separation as LEGO's modular building sets by tiling over most of the top and leaving a couple of studs the next floor could attach to. The 1x4 tiles with a stud on each end unfortunately have a habit of sticking to the floor above rather than the top of the floor they're on.
The front window on the second floor raised a challenge with this separate-floors system. It's designed to connect to the balcony outside, which is raised one stud above the second-floor interior normally, leaving an assembly of 1x1 and 1x2 plates to build the bottom of the window on the balcony section. To make the floors separate, I had to raise the second floor by three studs (or one whole brick, but I used lines of plates) so I could create an add-on to build the window onto while tiling under it on the balcony on the first-floor section. This issue did not recur for the attic floor, which did not need to be raised up that high when making it a separate piece. Because I'd ordered precisely the parts list of the original Sand Green bricks in Dark Red, I had to adapt to unforeseen technical issues by catering toward the official build and making the alterations bend to the instructed assembly, since I didn't have the Dark Red parts to spare and make more efficient substitutions.
At this point, it makes sense to start the tour of the finished model, with commentary about how I did certain things coming up when relevant. Here's the first look!
The Haunted House is primarily populated by the non-Series 14 Minifigures entries and the Build-a-Minifigure and custom figures, since the other monsters are all categorized on their themed display stands, though obviously, any of them could visit this house if they wished.
The grounds are obviously a major change, but the house exterior itself isn't too altered. The color is different and I left the spikes off the roof and porch roof railings. As mentioned, I swapped the zombie heads on the front columns for skulls, and I put gargoyles on the roof regardless of how out-of-place they look. I used jumper tiles to place pumpkins on the porch railings, too.
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| Just three gargoyles on the front. |
The grounds start with the front gate. The spooky tree figure stands to one side and there are pumpkins on the outside of the wall. The Studios pumpkin tops the gate as an icon of the house because it was the first LEGO pumpkin, and from its first horror theme.
All the trick-or-treater types are filing up to the house on the front path.
To the left (from a front view) is the graveyard with the twin Zombies. A skull and a clip piece here representing a bone arm are also emerging from the ground. The Series 4 Werewolf howls on the shed's roof, and the Spider Suit Boy is climbing up the house.
The front porch features the twin ghosts behind carved pumpkins, and two more pumpkins are on the ground in front of the porch.
The Vampire stands in the middle. This is no longer Lord Vampyre's Haunted House, so maybe it's this Vampire's instead!
The pumpkin witch and pink Spider Lady are on the walk above the porch. This wouldn't be an accessible space in reality, but it's real estate I can use!
My very favorite vignette in this whole build comes when we move to the right of the porch. I have the Series 2 Witch cooking a skeleton in a cauldron...and he's holding a spoon and tasting!
I'm so delighted by how this visual gag reads. It feels like something out of The Haunted Mansion's goofier scenes. Using a horizontal-clip skeleton arm for the right spoon-sipping pose sells the whole thing. The skeleton is loose inside the cauldron but fits well.
In the right corner of the grounds is a well, where a piece representing a skeleton arm is reaching out with a coin it found tossed in!
Down the side of the house, the Minifigures mummies are reclining on a sarcophagus lid. This is directly influenced by Haunted Mansion gags. The tree framing them is a very fragile build, but it adds something.
Further down, the Spider Queen is having a stroll, and the Green Man stands at the side door with monstrous plants surrounding him. The flytrap with the darker green head is taken from the DC Comics "Jokerland" set, and the lime-headed plant is from the Scooby-Doo set "Mystery Mansion". The flower with a tongue is my own assembly, with the mouth-printed head inside the flower mask coming from DC's Orca in the LEGO Batman Movie Minifigures line.
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| Also note the hole in the wall above created by a slope brick--this is a modification. |
In the corner, the LEGO Games-headed werewolf is burying his bone.
He better watch out for those plants, though!
The wicked wizard is standing by the back.
Because I wanted to use the roof for minifigures and needed to logically explain how the non-flying sort get up there, I ended up building a ladder of fence bricks from the ground to the roof, with the top section angling with the roof to meet the top. The ladder is meant to be an attached fixture, not a piece leaned up on the house, and doesn't touch the very ground.
I had to figure out how to make the ladder split in two pieces so the top two floors could each detach without having any ladder hanging down and preventing the floors from being laid flat on a table. I first thought I had solved it until I realized I'd attached the ladder's top half to the attic so it hung down when the attic was separated, but reworked it so the majority of the ladder is attached to the first floor and sticks up beyond the floor height, while the rest is attached to the attic without hanging below the floor height. It's not attached to the second floor at all.
The ladder needed to be pushed out a bit on the bottom floor since the overhang of the roof pushed the ladder out a bit on top. If the ladder was flat to the first-floor wall, the upper half of the ladder would stick out more than the rest, so I built a little brick and clip assembly into the first-floor wall to push out and grab the ladder in alignment with the rest.
The bars of the LEGO fence don't align with plates stacked up, so there wasn't a way to build a stack of two clips on top of each other and align them with a fence to make sure the lower ladder portion was rigidly clipped parallel to the walls of the house, but one clip layer is fine and if it needs to be fiddled into alignment, so be it.
On top of the roof are all the scientists, since lightning may strike up there. The Series 4 Scientist and Monster are set up with a table, and a kite with a key on its string is getting zapped to send electricity down.
The electric pumpkin is under the table.
On the other side, the custom scientist figures are working on the green brick monster.
The very top of the roof can hold one figure. The Sweet Treets Witch makes a good one!
A plated surface by the chimney which doesn't connect anywhere else just got a spiderweb to trim it. For the house to fully unfold, it needed to be built this way.
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| The house fully unfolded before I built the back plates and the ladder. The web is placed in the dark nook spot behind the shed in this picture, while the plates I added wrapping around the back under the ladder had to stop before the edge of the front of the grounds. |
I also re-rebuilt the front half of the grounds during this process. I had built them with two full plate layers, but larger plates stacked on each other are hard to get flat, and it made the ground a little warped and bent in a frustrating way. I also ordered a load of larger tan plates to re-plate the grounds more efficiently, and expanded the area to the sides of the gate a little more to have more space for my tree minifigure. The new plate layer has sparser plates running under the surface to link the surface together with gaps so it's sturdy without being warped by the plate connection, though more linking plate overlaps to keep surface parts together were needed as I found weak spots.
Here's the interior, dollhouse-style.
In the front hall, the staircase to the second floor is present. I raised the second floor too much in the separation modification, so I had to rebuild the staircase to U-turn and double back so the steps would properly reach the floor level upstairs. I also built on some brown bricks to enclose the side of the stairs.
I have a few figures in the entryway, with the Series 19 Fright Knight playing the haunted armor in the hall and the Games-headed devil in a chair.
The fireplace on the wall hosts Mr. Fireplace, the ghost of smoke and flame. He holds the flaming Green Goblin pumpkin.
On the other side, there's a sofa and a table with a zombie head in a cloche, and the kitchen section.
A teapot naturally sits on the cooking station and the Build-a-Minifigure pumpkin is placed by a cutting board with the knife that carved it.
There's very little space to stand in the kitchen, and there's no room anywhere for a dining table, but the monsters could set up an outdoor party if they wanted to.
Upstairs, there's not a lot because there needed to be room for the attic ladder, but the floor is plated and tiled to depict black carpeting and the Minecraft pumpkin and a Heroica werewolf microfigure serve as toys in the bedroom.
I turned a small portion of this floor into a tiny bathroom. No room for a shower, but there's a toilet and sink.
The other side has a sleeping area, with the occupants being the three spooky kids from the Minifigures line. The bedsheet tile pattern lines up in a row, a Games skeleton microfigure serves as another toy, and there's a wardrobe in the corner. The lights built into the wall were moved over to sit centered on the beds, which could not be centered on the wall while the wardrobe was there.
Inside the wardrobe is the Bogeyman!
The wardrobe is built around three doorframes, with the middle one empty. The doorframe in back has the door opening inward so the Bogeyman can't come out of the back. His horns are wide and force him to be slightly turned to fit inside the closet, and the door doesn't strictly close completely, but this was the most compact I could make it.
The attic has a trapdoor which drops when a pin in the side of the house is pulled, and the ladder mounted on it unfolds with hinges.
It is annoying how the ladder comes right to the fourth wall in dollhouse view, challenging you to explain how a figure reached it with no floor space in front of it. Even with my separate-floors mod, there's no way to appreciate the view of the deployed ladder with the floor closed because it's attached to the floor above.
In the ladder half of the attic is a large shelf with books and a zombie head on it, as well as a 1x1 dark red brick as a leftover souvenir from this rebuild.
The book stack on the lower shelf is loose, simply held snug between the shelves with no System connections, while the pieces on the top shelf are affixed, and the Bogeyman's storybook protrudes from a clip connection. This is the only actual book piece on the shelf, and it's meant to be the "handle book" of the shelf you would pull to activate the hinges.
The shelf swings open, and inside is a nook with the Build-a-Minifigure Ghost Lady!
She stands on a 2x2 jumper tile and can face forward to look out the window.
I conceived of a library shelf that would swing open early on, and thought of maybe putting a turntable inside with gears under the floor that would spin the ghost when you turned a knob or a crystal ball, but I dropped the turntable idea to make thing simpler. I thought maybe the second floor would make this gag possible, but it's actually the attic that has the floor plan and space to hide a nook behind a shelf, so I moved the sketch model I'd prepared up there instead.
The attic has built-in shelves and some junk around, including an old phonograph I kept from the original model. The cone is a grey explorer's helmet and the record is a stickered tile displaying "Music for Zombies".
A brick and stickered tile behind it serve as a newspaper stack, also from the original model.
On the other side, I put more of my own touches.
In the corner is a black chest containing a suitcase (that one-off Wizarding World sculpt) and an alternative record, displaying "Monster Rock". It'd be a good accessory for the Monster Rocker who released a few years later! I just wish it was printed.
Even when I had the Haunted House built factory-style ages ago, I put the LEGO Heroica golems on one of the attic shelves, and replicated that here. A 2025 Build-a-Minifigure ghost tile got a wall mount so it can fly around.
There's a table with a crystal ball on it, which I would have put anywhere else in the house if I only had the space. The head inside is a glow-in-the dark minifigure head from a Friends magician-carnival theme, and it's double-sided with theater-mask faces representing a good fortune or bad fortune.
On the side, I built a miniature dollhouse depicting the original Haunted House, to the best of my ability. Micro-builds are difficult! I made it hinge open, too, despite there being no interior.
Here's a view of the attic floor in closed mode.
And the floor below.
This is the pin that holds the attic trapdoor up. Re-stacking the floors while catching the trapdoor on this pin is tricky and I usually just have to reset it after putting the attic onto the house.
Here's a view down the staircase. The brown bricks on the right are closing gaps between floors while all being attached to the lower floor.
And here's the first floor closed. I didn't realize the fireplace was off-center until after these pictures.
The sitting area makes more sense with the floor closed.
So that's my Haunted House rebuild. Unwieldy, took up the last month-plus of my focus, oh my god where am I gonna put this thing; there has to be a better place for these figures...and I love it. It was really fun to redesign this model and expand it to give it detail and charm and purpose the original model lacked for me. The Haunted House was a strong architectural idea without much flourish otherwise, and the interior was dull. Here, I've made the house more on par with later Modular Buildings in floor construction and finish, but also made it distinctly itself by keeping the hinges and adding the grounds. I think the color change was a fun idea and it makes the Creator mansion now more worth keeping too.
I'm not sure I can manage to build any more spooky display models because I simply have nowhere for them to go right now, but I've definitely had fun with them this year!
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