In honor of all of the snow we’ve been getting and and apparently everyone else, I am posting this skull made out of snow. It was created by Paul Overton of Dudecraft and Noah Scalin from Skull-A-Day. You can read more about how they did it and see pictures of the skull as it formed here. Awesome job guys! Could you come over and build one in my front yard, please?

Once again I received a great photo from a reader. This one is of a very creepy looking tree at the side of the road.  As usual I tried to find the origin of this picture, but with no luck. Makes me wonder if it wasn’t manipulated. I wish this was in my yard. It would scare my neighbors to death and they’d never sleep. What a great Halloween decoration! Some plots of land have all the luck.

*Thanks Joe1785 for the picture.

Being a book store owner I naturally love books as well as all things scary. When I come across something that brings two of my loves together I get very excited and my wallet begins to quiver with anticipation. Here is a book that I have already placed my order for called Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities written by Amy Stewart. How could I not want this book? The title alone is worth it! I love to add odd and interesting books to my shelves at home. Though I do not have the book in my hot little hands yet, you can take a peak inside on the Amazon website. With titles like Deadly Dinner, Lawn of Death and The Devil’s Bartender the chapter’s names themselves are worth a read. Check out this cute little video the author did about the book.

I found this little Hungry Alien online a while back and I had a great idea for him. That just cracked me up and made me want him even more. He is very similar to the Alien Gnome Bandits I covered a few months ago. Probably by the same artist, though it doesn’t say that. This guy is made from recycled nuts, bolts and cutlery. He would look great out in the garden or overlooking your barbecue, but I have a better plan. Don’t you get tired of those dumb little pilgrims your grandmother puts on the table every year at Thanksgiving? Or what about the 40 year old little turkey that Uncle Joe made out of Styrofoam and feathers when he was 4 years old? Why not replace all of that crap and put him right in the middle of your Thanksgiving dinner table? That would certainly wake everyone up and put some fun on your table. Although, you might have to sneak it onto the table when Grandma isn’t looking or she may put a kibosh on your devious plans.

I’ve been looking for a cool weathervane since our new house has a spot for one. Most of them are pretty cheesy with roosters, cows or pigs on them which I do not want. I found this deliciously creepy Vampire Bat Weathervane that will be perfect! Bats flying around a moon! How great is that? Wouldn’t it be cool if it cast a shadow on the sidewalk? Probably too high for that. I first saw that it was a garden stake, but then I found that there is a roof mount one as well. It’s well priced at $69.95 and it’s made out of recycled aluminum, so you’re helping the planet too. Win, win! Now I just have to figure out how Scary Hubby is going to get it up there, because it is really high up. Maybe you can hire someone to do that?

Everyone gets mice now and then. It has nothing to do with cleanliness and everything to do with where you live and what time of the year it is. I speak from experience. Our old house had the problem every winter. The fact that the house was more than 100 years old made it super easy for them to get in. The house we live in now is brand new and in a new area. Mice love it when you build where they live. Anyway, I’m always looking for a new way to get rid of mice. Or should I say Scary Hubby is. I try to stay out of it. It really creeps me out. I would love to use these however. Unfortunately these were designed by Sarah Déry as a student project and not actually available for sale. I think it’s genius and somebody should totally produce these for sale. I’d buy ‘em.

A while back I saw a house with two of these climbing gargoyles climbing up the side of their house. I thought it was pretty cool at the time. I have never gotten around to getting a couple of them myself, but I think about it a lot. I’m really not sure why I havn’t done it, because it really is rather creepy. I think it may have to do with all of those movies about bugs that I used to watch on Saturday afternoons as a kid. You know the ones — Empire of the Ants, The Food of the Gods, The Swarm, and so on. The idea of things crawling up my walls is especially creepy to me. I’m thinking that putting a couple of climbing gargoyles on my walls is probably not the best idea. Especially when I tend to subscribe to the philosophy: why buy just one when you could buy 50.

Well, after spending the last month searching for the best Halloween decorations, recipes, costumes, decorating my new house and watching movies here are my thoughts. LAME! Okay not totally lame, but not as good as in years past. My biggest gripe was Halloween decor or the lack there of. Every Halloween I have spent hundreds of dollars on new decorations for the store and for the house that I could not live without. This year I spent $19.00 and that was just for spiderwebs, candles and misc. crap. WTF?! My thoughts are that with the bad economy they just didn’t really come out with anything new and scaled back on some of the more pricey items. My favorite has always been animatronics. I love things that move and say things. The ones they had this year were cheap looking and weren’t all that scary frankly.  Costumes were pretty lame as well. I wanted to post the scariest costume of the year, but I really didn’t see anything that was worth even a wimper. Some of the bad costumes that were popular, like Micheal Jackson and Octomom, were just in bad taste and stupid. Decorating our new house was great and everything worked better than we had hoped. We even got voted as the scariest house in the neighborhood, but there were a few that were really close. We’ll have to step it up a bit next year. Movie selection in the theaters was not even worth discussing, though rarely is it. All I can say is I really hope next year the economy is back on track and decorations are plentiful. This is my favorite time of the year and I found it depressing to go into stores that normally have huge Halloween displays and only had pitifully small racks of cheesy decor. Just my two cents.

A few weeks ago a reader told me about putting a ring of ghosts around a tree. Years ago I saw this as well, but did not think it was scary enough, so I created my own version. This has become probably the most successful and popular decoration we do in our yard. The problem we ran into was that the tree we had in our front yard was in a corner, so no way to put a ring of anything around it. So we came up with putting a large black plastic cauldron in the center. Inside we put one of those small flaming pot lights. You can also just use dry ice inside or a small fogger. Next we bought six strong garden stakes about 48″ long and six 6-8″ Styrofoam balls. We then put the stakes in the ground and pushed the Styrofoam balls onto the tops of the stakes to look like a head. I personally did not think the white fabric was all that scary, so I found some cheap black cloth at the fabric store and bought six yards. I think it cost $1.99/yd. I cut the fabric into six pieces and then draped each head and stake with it. Not completely over their head like a ghost, but more of hooded cloak. Once I figured out how I wanted the fabric to sit I glued it down to the heads. I then safety pinned the fabric right below the head and then a couple more times all the way down to keep the fabric closed. I pulled up a corner from each one and then the one next to it and tied them together. This makes them look like they are holding hands. When I was done I also added some small cuts to the bottoms of the fabric, so it looked tattered. We then decided this wasn’t scary enough and wanted some sort of creepy music. We ended up downloading some scary sounding monk chanting onto a CD. We hid a CD player in the bushes, turned on the flaming cauldron and ta da creepy Devil Worshipers. Later we decided to spray paint the Styrofoam balls black, which made it look even scarier. Every year we pull this out and it is by far the one thing we get the most comments on. I even get a little chill when I walk by and hear the moaning chanting monks. Thanks Beautiful Kind for reminding me of this project.

It is officially October, so that means Halloween is here! Halloween is a month long celebration for me and to get it going I am showing you the first decoration that I can’t be without. Now this Zombie Lawn Statue is quite expensive, but I wouldn’t be adverse to leaving it out all year long. Then it would be worth it. I would probably hide a small green light behind it to give it that really special eeriness. That pissy old lady that lives next to me might just run for the hills when she sees this or just move away which would be even better. I might just have to invest in it just for that. It was designed by the artist Alan Dickinson in resin and sells for $89.95. Don’t you have a neighbor that you’ve been looking to give a good scare to?