Haunting Your Yard!

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…..

People might consider us a little twisted, but with our son’s birthday 2 days before Halloween, and Shane’s birthday on Halloween, well, it has become a big deal. We love Halloween.

The first year all we did was carve pumpkins. From there, it’s gone a little crazy. Our hope with this website is to chronicle our Halloween activities.

When we can we will give some tutorials on how we made some of our props and the technique we happened to use. If we can help give people some great ideas and help spark a little Halloween excitement that’s all the better.

Halloween gives us a chance to go completely overboard and be creative. Leave us a comment – we’d love to hear from you!