Dare ya to check out Woodland's scary house
Monday, October 23, 2006 7:31 AM PDT
By Cathy Zimmerman
Printable version
E-mail this articleWOODLAND --- Dena Williams gets complaints when she doesn't "do it up like normal" for every holiday. "It" is the Williamses' Woodland home. And "normal" takes on a whole new meaning in October.
Dena and her husband, Tim, decorate their front yard and 1924 frame house on Davidson Street with dozens of full-size ghouls, homemade tombstones, corpses in the pond and macabre jokes.
"Every year, I try to do at least one more thing," said Dena Williams. "When we lived in Gresham, we lived in a tiny house, and we did the whole front. But not like this."
Since 1993, when the couple moved to Woodland, they've expanded the tradition. And raised thousands and thousands of goose bumps.
"I start the first weekend in October," Williams said. "If I work really hard, it takes me about three days" to do the whole set-up.
Tim helps with the house's second story. "I gotta love him," she said. "He does this for me."
Williams said she and Tim dress up on Halloween and hand out at least 200 full-size candy bars. But before trick-or-treaters tumble up this small-town street, they put on a nightly Halloween show every night for weeks.
On the porch, in the jittery light of a strobe, loom a life-size (or death-size) hangman, grim reaper and ghastly butler.
"At night, it really freaks the kids out," Williams said.
She uses a smoke machine, spine-tingling music and two candelabras right out of the Munsters.
Second-floor window panes reveal the silhouettes of a woman and a man with a knife held high. Spiders with 3-foot tentacle spans climb the second story.
Inside the glassed-in sun porch, five skeletons wear wigs and the tattered remnants of an elegant past. Williams has cut ghosts from white foam packing material and hung from the indoor porch ceiling, where a fan makes them drift and swoop.
The front yard is a shivery treat.
An icky rubber rat rears up near "human" leg bones poking out of the ground. A fountain stained with red food coloring gurgles through the eyes of a lopped-off head under a guillotine.
On a side fence, a blood-smeared man in a flannel shirt is impaled.
On the other side of the house, a tall woman in a long white dress and black cape peers out from a spooky mask.
Williams cuts tombstones out of Styrofoam coolers, searching out coolers with scalloped edges so they look like real grave markers.
"I spray paint them silver and use black for the names," she said.
The dearly departed represent live friends and relatives who are obviously good sports.
"Marcas was invited to dinner," says one. "R.I.S. -- Rest in Stomach."
He and others are pals of the Williamses' daughters, 16-year-old Cherrae and 11-year-old Laurisseh. Each girl's name also is on a fake tombstone.
Beloved daughter
Cherrae Brhielle
was visiting with friends outside of home one evening
when she was suddenly grabbed by an unknown creature.
A faint cry of pain and sound of crushing bones
is all that could be heard.
Here lies her shoe in memory.
Even the animals take part. The Williamses' cat, a bob-tail calico named Lynx, looks through the screen door as if he's part of the show.
"We had a black cat named Hex, who was born on Halloween, but he came up missing," Williams said. Maybe Hex will be back for his birthday. If not, his spirit will flit among these creations that conjure and corral the fears of real life.
Williams said that long-haul truckers, a husband and wife from the Midwest, once posted a picture of the site on a Web site. "They make arrangements to come by and see it" on their route.
People of all ages enjoy the night-time scene, but "I do this for the kids," she said. "If they didn't like it, I wouldn't be doing this."
free spirit wrote on Feb 7, 2008 1:19 AM:
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