‘This year, I went a little overboard:’ Resident’s ghoulish frontyard is a scary sight
Most residents on the 1500 block of North Valley Street know that when a holiday is around the corner, their neighbor Tina Schaefer will have the front of her house and yard decorated for the occasion.
For Halloween this year, Schaefer, who lives at 1505 N. Valley St., entered the Burbank Civic Pride Committee’s second annual Halloween Decorating Contest and took her decorations to another level, to the point where some of her neighbors have avoided walking on her side of the street, she said.
Schaefer’s driveway has been blocked off with caution tape. Sitting in the driveway is a silver Chrysler 300 with a zombie laying across the hood, as a ghoul and a gorilla sit inside the car. Her front lawn is now a graveyard, with dead bodies and skeletons rising from their final resting places.
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There’s even a werewolf trying to escape from a metal hatch, and Jason Voorhees, from the “Friday the 13th” movie franchise, guarding her front door.
“This year, I went a little overboard,” Schaefer said with a laugh.
Despite scaring her neighbors away, Schaefer’s decorations earned her first place in the committee’s competition this year, winning in the residential category.
“I think it’s kind of scary, but it’s also kind of cool,” Schaefer said. “The nice thing about it is that there’s a lot to look at. That’s what I like about it. There’s lights, some movement and stuff everywhere. It keeps the eyes busy.”
Donna Smith, owner of Samuel’s Florist at 921 W. Olive Ave., which won in the commercial category, took a slightly more subtle, but more complex approach to her display.
It features much more than scary goblins and zombies. Every year for Halloween, Smith and her family choose a gothic novel or horror fiction book and recreate a scene from them in their display.
They ask guests to guess which book the scene is from, and whoever guesses it, gets a free arrangement, Smith said.
Previous decorations received multiple guesses, Smith said, and eventually someone gets it right. However, the store has received only six guesses, so far, and they have not been close.
“The guesses are so far off,” Smith said. “Either we didn’t do a good representation or it’s not as popular as I thought.
The display encompasses a woman wearing a shawl standing next to a table with a globe on it. Also in a room is a bloody corpse being eaten by rats, all being watched by a ghost looking through a window.
“We didn’t want to do something too easy or too gory,” Smith said.
The winner in the youth category was 11-year-old George Wyatt, who won for the second year in a row.
The front lawn of his home at 841 N. Frederic St. was again filled with an inflatable dragon, pumpkins and a reaper.
“I’m pretty proud of it and I hope everyone enjoys our decorations,” George said. “I’m very honored.”
The list and addresses of all the winners and entries in this year’s Halloween Decorating Contest are available online here.
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Anthony Clark Carpio, anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com
Twitter: @acocarpio
