Farewell to Grey Blackwell, whimsical N&O illustrator, haunted farm impresario
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- Grey Blackwell was The News & Observer’s whimsical illustrator and caricature artist.
- He built Granville Haunt Farm into a regional draw with drive‑through zombie paintball.
- Blackwell died unexpectedly at 56, prompting hometown tributes and memories.
In its final years in its old office on McDowell Street, The News & Observer occupied a dingy labyrinth of mostly empty rooms and dusty hallways where ghosts floated past with green eyeshades and inky fingers, operating machines nobody had turned on in 20 years.
But in the center of that beautiful wreck you would find Grey Blackwell in his colorful office the size of a jail cell, busily drawing outrageous cartoons and giggling to himself: Coach Mike Kryzyzewski dancing in MC Hammer pants, Gov. Mike Easley spinning out in a NASCAR race, Paula Deen juggling jars of mayonnaise.
And no matter what assignment anyone brought, no matter what request they made of his outsized talent, he took it gladly and probably offered a joke in return. This was an artist who published cartoons in MAD Magazine and got his caricature of Lebron James printed on packages of Bubbilicious gum, but he didn’t mind drawing you a map of a murder scene.
He was more than a light in the darkness. He was a lava lamp.
King of the Haunt Farm
If you didn’t know Blackwell from his animated illustrations in The N&O — notably former NC State football coach Chuck Amato dressed in what can only be described as a pimp suit — then you certainly appreciated him in his life’s second act: the mind behind Granville Haunt Farm.
In 2014, Blackwell transformed his family land outside Oxford into a haunted corn maze complete with spooky party bus and a small army of ghouls, goblins and killer clowns — all local kids he gave jobs.
Every year, he turned a cornfield into a carnival of fake blood, then tore it all down for a drive-through Christmas display, complete with Nakatomi Plaza from “Die Hard.”
His Halloween farm drew visitors from New England to Florida, and it offered an attraction no other local haunt could touch: zombie paintball. For $15, you could fill a gun with exploding pellets and ride a flatbed through a zombie attack, blasting the undead creatures as they lumbered from the woods.
You could always find him in the middle of that blackness, grinning wider than a jack-o-lantern.
“One of the things that I really enjoy,” he told The N&O in 2018, “for all of the hard work that I put into it, it’s a lot of fun just to, once everything is in operation, just to kind of sit back and take a breath and hear all the laughter and people having a good time. That’s when you know, OK, you’re doing something right.”
Delightful, chaotic fun
All of this comes tearfully to mind with the news that Blackwell died unexpectedly this week. He was 56.
Friends in his hometown of Oxford poured tributes onto social media, recalling his football-playing days at Webb High School, where as an undersized tackle, he never let anybody through.
As a band member, he chose the bass saxophone — a cannon-sized instrument that honks like Satan’s Studebaker. Think the last note in “The Muppet Show” theme.
“When there was a lull,” wrote childhood friend and bandmate Mike Elliott, “he would regale us with Nena’s unmistakable ‘99 Luftballons’ riff. He was always, always smiling.”
More friends recalled how he and his brother created a life-sized cutout of Indiana Jones for the window of the Oxford Ledger, the sort of craftsmanship that would come in handy at Granville Haunt Farm, aka “Home of the Original Restored Green Goblin Head from Maximum Overdrive.”
“When COVID hit, he had the brilliant idea of doing a drive-through haunted attraction,” wrote his friend Chance Wilkinson. “In the midst of a pandemic, people drove from all over the United States to come to the drive-through haunt farm. It made the news because it was so big. We had to push buses out of the mud, splashing dirt all over us. One night, we worked until 3 a.m. because traffic was backed up for miles. It was delightful, chaotic fun.”
Goodbye, friend
In this tribute, I’m the guy asking the Mad Magazine illustrator to draw me a crime scene map.
I’m also the guy who brought his kid to Granville Haunt Farm every October, despite his firm opposition to haunted corn mazes, just so he could paint-ball blast the heavily-padded zombies hiding behind haystacks.
In this business of reporting the news, we run across characters who can perform casual magic tricks, dropping little marvels out of their hands to decorate a drab Tuesday.
Sometimes we find them inside our own walls.
This story was originally published February 5, 2026 at 3:56 PM.