Haunting Your Yard!

I don’t know if last night was truly a full moon – but it was close enough.  And it was clear enough for Dylan to get some pictures.  He had to be out there at just the right time for the moon to be in a position to be photographed with the graveyard.

In this first picture of the graveyard and the mausoleum you can see the moon peaking out of the tree.

This next picture was kind of odd – which is why I’m posting it.  He used the flash and it almost looks like it was taken during the day and that the moon is the sun.

The lighting was just so….strange.  You can see the flood lights so you know it’s night, but it doesn’t look like night.

Next was this close up of the witch on the roof.

This one came out pretty well considering he had to zoom in.

The last pictures I wanted to post were of the flying crank ghost.  We hadn’t had a chance to take any pictures after setting her up because the weather had gotten so bad.  This is the first year we’ve actually put her outside.

Halloween 2006 was the first year we added a moving prop! She is usually referred to in the Halloween world as a Flying Crank Ghost, or FCG.

She really is an amazing prop. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the best of pictures of her in 2006 – we really seemed to drop the ball in the picture department in general and we lost some pictures due to a computer crashing.

We had built a whole mineshaft with walls that I created using chicken wire and papermache that were made to look like cave walls. I think I spent almost two months working on those walls. Some had bones that were made to look as if they were embedded in the stone. Some had dynamite sticks (made out of toilet paper tubes) sticking out.

It took multiple layers of papermaching, then painting a base coat, then adding some other effects to make them look aged. They looked okay in the daylight, but looked great in the darker lighting.

We also had prop skeletons in the cave and panning for gold pans, rocks, railroad tracks leading out of the cave, etc. We even went to the trouble of buying a bird cage, aging it, and putting a fake bird in there, upside down, so that it seemed as if the gases had been what took all the miners.

Right now you’re probably thinking, “Boy, I’d love to see pictures of that!”. Well, I would too – but they all seemed to have gotten lost in the later computer crash. All I ended up with was pictures of the building processes.

One cool new prop we made for the front porch was a skeleton wrapped in spider webbing.

That was nice hanging from the ceiling of the garage for a few weeks until we started decorating the outside.

As usual, it made all of our neighbors wonder about us.

I don’t want to say 2006 was a bust because it wasn’t. I was our best year up to that point. I just don’t have the pictures to prove it!

Oh well. Onward and upward as they would say…..