A Spook-tacular Sensation

It was never intended to be Evangeline’s. Not as we know it. Not as we love it.

When it launched in 1974, before it was Old Sacramento’s revered emporium of costumes and kitsch, the shop wasn’t even called  Evangeline’s. Founder Dorothea Chaussé dubbed her enterprise simply Evangeline—her middle name, inspired by the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.” It was an elegant brand beneath which to sell “fine jewelry, antiques and gifts” (as her original business card put it) to visiting locals and tourists in the riverfront district.

From the beginning, Dorothea’s 19-year-old daughter Deborah picked up part-time shifts working for her mother between classes at Sacramento State. Even as Deborah chipped away at a psychology degree, she took to her mother’s business, which slowly evolved to include novelty items, gag gifts and the like. Need a rubber chicken or a whoopee cushion? Evangeline had you covered.

A Frida Kahlo mannequin anchors the Día de los Muertos section.

“I just kept showing up,” the 69-year-old Deborah Chaussé says today, reflecting on a half-century of the iconic K Street storefront. By 1980, she says, she was a convert to the retail life.

Then, in 1985, everything really changed. “My mother wanted to retire,” she recalls. “I’m like, ‘Well, what’s going to happen to the store, Mom?’ She just said, ‘Here are the keys.’ ” And suddenly, what wasn’t Chaussé’s plan became something like her destiny—and Sacramento’s.

In its 50th year, Evangeline’s has ensconced itself in Old Sacramento as the district’s longest continually operating retail operation. Chaussé launched a second wing of the business, Evangeline’s Costume Mansion, in 2000. The original store and its younger upstairs sibling together inhabit roughly 12,000 square feet of space between two buildings Chaussé acquired that same year—her original building, and another that happens to be the oldest in Old Sacramento, the 1852-era Lady Adams Building.

The Costume Mansion’s “Circus” area greets visitors who take a vintage-style elevator to the building’s third floor.

The costume business arose almost by accident: The main store’s late-’90s sideline in bright-colored hair dye and spike necklaces—“alternative products for an alternative crowd,” Chaussé recalls—drew customers seeking punk-rock outfits for Halloween. The Costume Mansion, which Chaussé says felt like a huge risk at the time, blossomed from there. Today, demand for adult costumes leading up to Halloween drives about 65% of Evangeline’s annual storewide sales.

Around the same time, she launched the store’s website. The “evangeline.com” domain wasn’t available for purchase then, Chaussé discovered. However, “evangelines.com” was.

Thus inaugurated the unofficial transition of Evangeline to Evangeline’s (incidentally, Dorothea pronounced her middle name “eh-van-juh-lynn,” in contrast to the “eh-van-juh-leens” pronunciation commonly used by generations of shoppers in reference to the store). The jewelry business has since expanded into a one-stop shop synonymous with clever greeting cards, saucy home goods (like a doormat exclaiming, “Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit; look who’s here!”) quirky cookware (such as the nine varieties of animal-themed tea infusers like the Manatea  or the Slow Brew sloth), and a library’s worth of giftable books (from the New York Times  best-seller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck  to no fewer than four tributes to Keanu Reeves, including Keanu Reeve’s Guide to Kindness ).

Deborah Chaussé as a teen with her mother and Evangeline’s founder, Dorothea, at the Old Sacramento shop in the mid-1970s (Photo courtesy of Evangeline’s).

Chaussé herself still leads the store’s meticulous buying process, working with longtime staffers to maintain thick binders of handwritten inventory lists and sling merchandise from their labyrinthine basement stockroom to the sales floor. Their methods channel the willfully analog nature of a flinty, brassy Old Sacramento institution: Apart from a few brief experiments with online shopping over the years, Evangeline’s wants you to come to it, not the other way around. And why wouldn’t you? Even the best e-commerce platform on Earth could do no justice to the colors and textures and vibe of mischief that envelop anyone who walks through the door—the high walls and narrow corridors crowded with curios competing for your attention. Instagram can’t deliver to you the soft light of vintage stained glass on the winding staircase, or the birdcage-style elevator with its clanging metal gates, lifting you from the boardwalk entrance to the repurposed carved-wood fireplace and bar on the third floor of the Costume Mansion. More than ever, it’s the kind of place where you find yourself nudging whomever you’re there with, pointing to some weird item and asking with gobsmacked disbelief, “Did you see this?”

Chaussé doesn’t blanch at the word “novelty” or the idea that she trafficks in it. “I love it!” she says. “That’s what we are. Evangeline’s is a joke store.” She’ll give most any product a try as long as it’s not tastelessly oversexed or coarse. (The store has a “naughty nook,” reserved primarily for products containing salty language.) Chaussé does, however, reject the notion of selling disposable, ordinary crap. “We don’t just sell mugs,” she says. “There’s always a hook. You know, it’s Lord of the Rings  or it’s a trend item. It’s popular culture.” You don’t get a basic cookbook at Evangeline’s, for instance. You get a Snoop Dogg cookbook. You don’t pick up a classic Little Golden picture book for kids here. You pick up Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Star Wars Little Golden Book—with Yoda on the cover. Sappy greeting cards are particularly anathema. “I don’t do that well with cards that are just nice,” Chaussé says. “They’re edgy, you know?”

A coin bank masquerading as a spell book gives shoppers the evil eye.

As for the celebrated Costume Mansion, this year marks its 25th season selling everything from wigs to masks to packaged getups based on pop culture icons ranging from Deadpool to Harry Potter to even Ferris Bueller (for you Gen Xers) and other personas that range from silly to scary to sexy (like the his-and-hers Hugh Hefner pajamas and accompanying Playboy bunny outfit). The Costume Mansion, once open only during spooky season, began offering its wares year-round in 2011 as summertime ravers and Burning Man acolytes, to name a few, started flocking here for a funky selection of trippy hats, iridescent boas and cartoonish platform heels. Comic book vixens Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn dominate for the ladies, with more modern nods to the namesake of Netflix’s hit Addams Family  spinoff Wednesday. Guys gravitate toward classic heroes like Spider-Man and Batman, while this year’s Beetlejuice  sequel has stirred interest in the irreverent Tim Burton antihero as well.

Meanwhile, roughly half of the 3,000 wigs sold annually at the Costume Mansion fly out the door in October. Chaussé cites the store’s third-floor “wig wall” as one of the most popular parts of the whole Evangeline’s operation—a spectral forest of mannequin busts draped with bobs, braids, curls and colorful hairpieces that wow identity-curious tourists and locals alike all year long. (For the cost of a nylon wig cap—25 cents—visitors can experiment endlessly with the help of the Costume Mansion’s expert staff.) Also for Halloween, the store opens up its second-floor “Parlor”—a retired vault from the building’s erstwhile bank days, now appointed like a funeral parlor, with ghostly costumes and props flanking a skeleton in a coffin.

“We have real leather hats here,” says Chaussé, who emphasizes the Costume Mansion’s focus on both quirk and quality.

Speaking of ghosts, a specter named Frank is said to haunt the premises; some staffers swear they’ve seen or heard him in the racks of costumes upstairs. For her part, Chaussé says she’s not a believer, but acknowledges the spookiness of the Gold Rush-era building when she opens Evangeline’s for business each morning. “I learned to just take a deep breath, calm down, turn on all the lights, and just not be scared,” she explains.

It’s all in a day’s work for Chaussé—or 50 years’ work. But who’s counting? She brushes off talk of succession or retirement, though she admits this year’s milestone anniversary has her thinking about her next phase. Unlike her mother, she won’t hand the keys off to her own adult children, who have careers of their own. For now, she’s got three floors of gloriously offbeat unfinished business to keep her busy—very  busy. “As long as I’m healthy, this is where I want to be,” she says. “This is where I’m happiest.”