In October 2013, we had been in our new house for about a month and a half, which meant I was still surrounded by boxes, trying to figure out where everything belonged, and generally pretending that moving was not nearly as exhausting as it actually was. My dog had died the month before, so I was also sad and a little emotionally untethered, which apparently made it the perfect time to decide that I absolutely needed to decorate the yard for Halloween.
There were two small problems with this plan. First, I had never actually decorated an entire yard for Halloween by myself. When I was little, my mom would hand my sister and me some of that polyester spiderwebbing and tell us to decorate a few bushes. I would do mine, look over at my sister’s, decide hers looked terrible, and then go fix it. That was basically the full extent of my outdoor Halloween decorating résumé. Second, we had just bought a house. Money was tight, we were paying off student loans, Aaron was working, and I was waiting to take the bar. So naturally, I did what any millennial with limited funds and entirely too much confidence would have done in 2013: I went on Pinterest.
Pinterest was full of these beautiful, ghostly chicken-wire figures that looked like they had floated straight out of some elegant haunted garden. I saw them and immediately thought, “Yes, I can do that,” despite having absolutely no reason to believe I could do that. I am not a metal artist. I am not a sculptor. I had worked with chicken wire exactly once before, on one small project at our old house in Vienna, Virginia, and that experience did not somehow qualify me to create a life-size spectral woman in a ball gown.
Still, off I went to Home Depot with the little decorating money I had. I bought chicken wire, put on gloves, and started shaping this thing by hand. Somehow, I managed to make something that actually resembled a woman, and then I got ambitious and started building out a big, dramatic skirt. I added leaves to it because I thought they looked beautiful woven through the wire, conveniently forgetting that leaves eventually dry out and die. In fairness, she was a ghost, so that part ended up being thematically appropriate.
And because apparently one completely unnecessary chicken-wire person was not enough, I made her a daughter.
The mother stood there in the yard waving with one arm while holding her little ghost daughter’s hand with the other. It was actually very sweet, especially considering they were both made out of sharp metal and one of them would eventually send me to the doctor. I loved the little mother-and-daughter scene, and for that first Halloween they stood together looking appropriately ghostly while I congratulated myself on somehow pulling off something I had absolutely no business attempting.
For a little while, I was very pleased with myself. Then the chicken wire started to rust, which should have been my cue to become more careful. Instead, one day I went outside to adjust the mother and managed to cut the shit out of my hand. There is a very specific kind of clarity that comes from staring at a rusty piece of metal and then looking down at your bleeding hand. I went to the doctor, got a tetanus shot, and from that point forward I only handled her with gloves. She also received her permanent name: Lady Tetanus.
Her daughter never got a similarly distinguished name because, unfortunately, she did not survive long enough to earn one. When I pulled the ghosts out of storage the following year, the little girl had gotten crumpled and tangled up in the gardening equipment I kept in the outdoor storage closet. Chicken wire is not especially forgiving once it has been mashed into hedge trimmers, shovels and whatever else I had shoved in there, and after trying to salvage her, I finally had to admit she was done.
I cried when I threw her away.
Yes, I cried over a homemade chicken-wire ghost child that had spent exactly one Halloween in my yard. I realize how ridiculous that sounds, but I had made her with my own hands, she had held Lady Tetanus’s hand all season, and apparently that was enough for me to become emotionally attached to a rusting piece of poultry fencing. Lady Tetanus continued on as a single mother for another year before I finally retired her too.
She was also responsible for teaching me another very important decorating lesson: lighting matters. The Pinterest versions of these ghosts always seemed to glow magically after dark, like they were floating through the yard. Mine looked pretty good during the day and then more or less disappeared at night. I clearly had not cracked whatever lighting code those Pinterest people had figured out, and as a result, the photographs from that first year are not exactly award-winning documentation.
I did more than just Lady Tetanus and her doomed daughter that year. I added spiderwebs around the outside of the house, tried to make the yard look spooky, and generally put far more effort into Halloween than the number of visitors ultimately justified. When Halloween night came, I was excited. I had this whole display, I had put real work into it, and I was ready for trick-or-treaters.
We got about eight.
I was crushed. I had spent all this time building an entire chicken-wire ghost family, had literally gotten a tetanus shot in the process, and almost nobody came. I remember thinking that after all that effort, eight trick-or-treaters felt deeply unfair. So I made myself a promise that the next year I was going to get more trick-or-treaters if it fucking killed me.
Thankfully, it did not kill me, but it did start something.
The next year the decorations got bigger. Then they got bigger again. I figured out the lighting problem. I added more webbing, more props, more scenes and eventually animatronics. I learned what actually showed up from the street, what looked good in photos, what was worth the effort and what was not. The neighborhood grew too, and more people started decorating their own houses. Over time, Halloween became one of those things people actually looked forward to, and our house became part of the experience.
What started with a little chicken wire and far too much confidence eventually turned into a full-scale annual production. By the time we moved, Halloween at our house looked nothing like that first attempt in 2013. There were elaborate scenes, lighting, animatronics, giant webs and all the other nonsense I somehow accumulated over the years. The funny part is that the reputation apparently stayed with the house even after we left.
We moved five years ago, and the new owners still get comments from people asking why they do not decorate for Halloween the way we did. To their credit, they have tried. This year, one of them finally messaged me and asked what I used to do for Halloween, so I sent over a bunch of old pictures. After seeing them, his response was essentially, “Yeah, that is not what we are going to be able to do,” which was probably the most rational reaction anyone has ever had to my Halloween decorating.
When I look back at the pictures from 2013 now, the display seems almost comically small compared with what Halloween eventually became at that house. The photos are dark, the webbing was basic, Lady Tetanus was held together by chicken wire, dead leaves and optimism, and her poor daughter did not even make it to year two. Still, I love those pictures because that year was the beginning of everything.
I did not have a huge decorating budget. I did not have a garage full of props, a storage unit full of animatronics or any real idea what I was doing. I had a new house, Pinterest, a roll of chicken wire, a recently updated tetanus vaccination, one prematurely deceased ghost child and about eight trick-or-treaters.
Apparently, that was enough to create a monster.
