The ghosties went back up on the porch, as usual.  (I love the way Dani looks like she's in a horror movie here.)

And we put a couple in the trees.

The gravestones went back up as well.  However, I didn't put any stones around them this year.  The ones we had last year ended up around the fence to keep the little dogs from trying to get out.  We never found a good construction site full of debris to pilfer this time around.

This year I wanted to steal Liz's idea for a corpse sneaking out of the grave, so we went to the Halloween superstore and picked up some props (and makeup; see the 2007 costume gallery).

Can I just say that a nude bodysuit for a kid is a freaky idea.  Seriously.

Also from the Halloween store: I just thought this was funny.  It's a lollipop stuck in some spider webs by the cash register.  Some elements of Halloween are simply incompatible.

So anyway, I got a couple bags of top soil and the plastic skeleton...

...and put him in the dirt like he was coming out of the ground. I didn't actually have legs on him (as you can see in the pic above).  I hadn't really figured out what to do with them though.  Maybe something next year?

Dani had this idea we'd put up a web made with wires.  I didn't think it was a great plan (i.e., we have a white house and webs are white), but I went along with it.

You can tell she knows it's a bust, but she won't face that fact. .

Here's what it ultimately looked like.  It isn't too bad when it contrasts with the night, but looking at it from the front, it's almost invisible.  The plan was to adorn it with baby spiders, but we never got around to making any.  The one from last year was already hanging from the roof (same as last year) with the big on above it (same as last year).  Next year we'll have to try a different approach.

We did get some more powerful black lights this year than we tried last time.  This is a long-exposure shot without the flash.  The ghosts are backlit pretty nicely.

It was on sale at the Halloween super-store.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn't as cooperative this year.  It got mega-windy, so the ghosts were tossed all around in the tree, and the ties on some of these guys broke.  The "Enter at your own risk" sign that was up here last year ended up flying off.  I saved it and put it and everything else back up once the wind died down.

The rain sogged up the ground, so the plywood spikes holding the tombstones down turned to mush.  I went back and added "vampire stakes" like the one you see in the foreground, then ran a sheetrock screw through the front of the "stone."

Once the mud was dry, the skeleton looked pretty good.  I like the bird on "Jake's" gravestone.

A night-time shot just before we went out on Saturday.

Jack Skellington mid-song.  Note the giant spider on the roof and the baby below.  You can barely see the spider web on the left... which is why we frequently ran smack into it like flies.

I see Jehovah's witnesses in my neighborhood all the time, but they have only come to the door once, and that was more than a year ago.  This year the decorations were either not offensive enough to them or were so overwhelmingly repellent to them that I ought to mark my methods.  However, last year around this time I put up Halloween decorations and had two other preacher types come to the door within about a week.  Coincidence or intelligent design?

Back to the Index