His holy grail to find a skeleton took him to a scalper who was asking $900 for the plastic bare bones. Like Braithwaite, school teacher Matt Gregory belongs to a Skelly Facebook group with 36,000 members. "We're going to keep them up until Christmas and change them into elves." She has bought a Santa suit for Skelly. They're crawling up the side of our house. Coronavirus pandemic or no, she just wanted to create something that would bring fun and good-natured fright to her neighborhood. Braithwaite estimates she and her husband have spent more than $1,500 on Halloween decorations. "All the stuff that's happened the last two years, it's nothing but bad news," she said. Though she had considered buying from a scalper at $200 above the retail price, she was able to buy one for the regular selling price of $299. "I think I screamed in the guy's ear," she said. He wasn't supposed to do this, he said, but he wanted her to know that he had a Skelly in stock. "They were tired of hearing from me," she said.Ĭome summer, she got a call from a Home Depot manager who surreptitiously phoned from the warehouse. "Every single day I called every Home Depot within a 150-mile radius of our house." She began to wear out her welcome. “I’m not sure what next year has in store, but I hope to get more use out of it."This year I started buying decorations in May," she told Inside Edition Digital. “I'd rather not just have that once a year with Halloween.”Īnd after October 31? “I’ve told people I'd leave it out year-round, and put a Santa hat during Christmas, and Easter eggs for Easter,” Byrne says with a laugh, adding that he'll actually find room in the garage to store it away. “I'd love to channel this passion and get a gig or two, whether it be building props, costumes, or random projects,” Byrne says. People have even reached out to discuss potential projects after seeing the magnificent creation. “It's fun to see people stop and take pictures of it, and especially fun if they’re stopped at the traffic light that's a block away, look over to the left and realize there's a giant skeleton up there.”īyrne says he's even had some anxiety dreams about it-but not the nightmares you might expect: “I kept thinking I'll come out in the morning and it'll be crumpled mass on the ground, but it's holding up well.” “Seems like people are getting a kick out of it,” Byrne says. "Maneuvering the giant pieces of the skeleton was definitely a two-person job," Byrne says.Īfter working on it for five full weekends and some evenings after work, his monster is now on full display. “I knew what I needed to do visually, but struggled with how to build this so a wind doesn't knock it down."ĭop Troutman, Byrne's husband, provided feedback throughout the process, offered tips on how to paint the skull, and "was instrumental in helping with the installation." More difficult was the wooden frame holding the monster together. “I had never really thought about how many bones are actually in the hand,” Byrne says. He used rigid wall insulation foam to fashion a six-foot-three-inch skull, hands, and a wooden frame to hold the head and hands in place.Ĭrafting the two hands proved more labor-intensive than he imagined. To ensure the skeleton's proportionality, Byrne used his own body's dimensions and multiplied by seven-and-a-half-meaning the monster, if fully created, would stand 45 feet tall. 8 products Life-Size Poseable Skeleton, 5ft - Halloween Decoration 59.00 Rated 4.61 out of 5 stars (322) In-store shopping only Unavailable for store pickup Add to Cart Yorrik the Skeleton's Grave Halloween Decorating Kit 69.00 Rated 0 out of 5 stars In-store shopping only Unavailable for store pickup Add to Cart Skeleton Door Greeter Kit 65. After going back and forth about what type of monster he wanted to create, he finally settled on a robed skeleton. So this year, instead of costumes, he put his energy into Halloween decorations: He wanted to make use of his home’s relatively flat roof and parapet wall to stage a ghoulish creature. “I felt like I was setting the bar higher and higher and got nervous I was going to max out at some point." I dressed my husband up as a sandworm that stood 10 feet tall,” he says. “Last year, for example, we were characters from Beetlejuice. Each year for the past 20 years or so, he's created elaborate group costumes: characters from Spaceballs, Pee Wee's Playhouse, and a giant papier-mâché bobblehead of himself, for which he took top prize at his office costume contest. Lincoln Square, you're in for a scare-that is, if you happen to walk by Foster and Western and see the giant robed skeleton towering over Kevin Byrne and his husband's home.įor Byrne, a director of analytics at a media company, Halloween has always been a time to exercise his creative muscles.
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