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…..

Halloween 2005….the big addition that year was our mausoleum. It was quite the spectacle and a little, well, sick, considering we made it tall enough for Dylan or me to stand in. We also put our family name, Cooper, across the top.

Little big of lighting and a ghost hanging inside and it looked pretty cool.

We slowly made more handmade tombstones, and replaced the wooden ones.

The previous year was the first time we had done a “scene” in the garage, that is only on display Halloween night. It was very thrown together - last minute - but ended up being a big hit because we were able to have more interaction with our trick-o-treaters and the parents.

What we did was sit outside in our scene - that year it had been a mad scientist lab of sorts - and served hot apple cider and handed out candy.

In 2005 we stepped it up - a lot. We built walls to block off the rest of the garage and created a haunted saloon. It really turned out

great. We sat behind the “bar” and served the apple cider that year.

We had things down to the detail - the skeleton poker players dressed as cowboys with chaps, wanted posters that were aged, and the old timey jugs.

Huge hit, but we were beginning to have a storage nightmare. We had to go out after Halloween that year and rent a storage unit for our Halloween props. We weren’t just decorating the outside - we also decorate the inside as well. We were quickly running out of room!