🎃 100 spooky yards

Gabe Lyrek, his daughter, and her friend are futzing with an inflatable haunted archway when I approach, asking if I can take a picture of their lawn decor.

It's an interaction I've had many times this afternoon already, and like everyone else, Gabe is happy to run down the various items festooning the front yard of his home on the 4200 block of 40th Ave, which he figures he's already spent a double-digit number of hours decorating this year. There’s cobweb on the fence, skeletons in chairs, spiders, fake blood, a statue of a demon girl, a skull, jack-o-laterns, plastic headstones, and a wooden sign that says “Zombie Feeding Area.” In the boulevard he's made plywood cutouts of a stack of pumpkins and a mini skeleton, for photo ops. Between his and some heavily decorated neighboring yards, the block has become something of a destination for trick-or-treaters, and he reports that last year 180 kids stopped by, a figure he knows exactly because he portions out individual bags of several pieces of candy apiece to make sure everyone gets a fair amount. 

Gabe’s family might be on the harder core end of the spectrum for Halloween decorating, but not by that much. Across the neighborhood, various combinations of these types of ornaments reliably spring up every October in preparation for the year’s spookiest holiday. To fully take it in, I — somewhat foolishly, and occasionally remorsefully — biked the 50-plus miles of north-south roads in the neighborhood to document the many forms these decorations take. 

I ended up with photos of hundreds of yards. They ranged from all-out zoos of inflatable creatures to a few hanging ghosts made of cheesecloth. The most extreme cases tended to be in clusters, suggesting some healthy one-upmanship among neighbors. But no matter how elaborate or subdued, each showed evidence of someone spending their free time and money to make a passerby's experience a little more interesting.

Below are some of the highlights. For a more comprehensive rundown, I compiled many of the rest into an interactive map (which, sadly, limits 100 entries), in case that's useful for planning your walks or trick-or-treating. If yours isn’t on there, it’s not because it wasn’t regarded highly. Perhaps it wasn't up yet when I passed by, perhaps it was too dark or light out to notice, or perhaps you were using a ladder beyond its safest rung and I didn't want to spook you (happened more often than you'd think.) When it was finally time to winnow down the final 100, my brain had a seriously diminished ability to process Halloween visuals. If you know of a showstopper I missed, please let me know.