SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Every year at Halloween, Aimee Phelps and her partner, Danell Eshnaur, do it up big.
For the past 10 years, their Oak Park home has been the scene of some truly lavish Halloween tableaux – intricate, imaginative, and guaranteed to delight trick-or-treaters.
Phelps likes to mix things up. For example, in past years she’s included a skeletal postal carrier clinging to a telephone pole with a skeleton dog nipping at his heels.
This year she thought the joke might have gotten old and perhaps a change was necessary. She couldn’t bring herself to do it, though. Those particular characters were much loved by post-office worker Tim Davie, who died this year. In fact, the postal carrier uniform was his idea. In its previous incarnation, the skeleton wore ordinary street clothes.
So once again, the eternal foes, postal carrier and vicious cur, are represented in Phelps’s Halloween extravaganza. But this year, the display is dedicated to Davie, a much-loved mainstay of the Oak Park post office.
“Everybody loved him – everybody loved him. He was very personable and happy and kind...I miss him a lot this year. He just was somebody that was a big part of our community,” said Phelps.
Someone left a hand-painted headstone with the words “RIP Tim Davie” on Phelps’ porch, and she placed it at the foot of the telephone pole. She welcomes community contributions.
“I told anybody that wants to, if they want to put something here as an honor, go ahead. So I opened it up to the community if they wanted to do it,” she said.
There are possibly hundreds of skeletons on display; large, small, and of various species, from dinosaurs to modern day critters, to mythological creatures like mermaids.
Spiders are well represented. There are also crows, rats, centipedes and a gargoyle. The decorations are so multilayered it seems every time you look you see something you didn’t see before.
A fantastic alien autopsy takes place near a crash-landed flying saucer – incidentally, handmade by Phelps, an artist whose works can be seen around town and beyond.
A creepy little girl on a swing that talks and sings was one of Phelps first Halloween décor creations.
The décor spills over into the neighbors’ yard, and other neighbors have joined in the fun.
"Halloween House" brings spooky fun to Oak Park
Popularity of the "Halloween house" has grown over time.
“The first year we did [the display] we had like maybe six kids. It was super disappointing,” Phelps said. “Then, through the years, they’ve found...that we are going to do it and we’re going to do it big. And [now] we have zombies and monsters and everybody comes out and does the scare thing… And it’s a lot of fun. And now we have lines and we go through 10 or 15 bags of candy.”
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