Around the corner from Leo Guglielmo’s home in Brighton is a ghastly place where dozens of skeletons mingle with werewolves and other frightful figures.
“There’s the Halloween House!” the 4-year-old shouts at his first glance of 321 Varinna Drive. “Look at that.”
Three dozen skeletons, some standing, others on horseback or towering overhead. Five fog machines. A dragon. A pirate ship.
Leo’s mom says he can sit in the driveway here for a half an hour, taking it all in – especially at night.
“AHHH! Look at that thing right there!” he shouts. “Oooh.”
A lot of people put out pumpkins, skeletons and oversized spiders this time of year. What makes this house special is the sheer scale of the display.
At dusk is when the lights come on, the music plays, and a mix of animatronic skeletons – and the Angel of Death – come alive.
It’s a world unto itself, born from the imagination of Regina Pimm, who lives here.
“So these are our villains,” she says, walking through the display one recent weekday afternoon. “We have the predator, the werewolf … and then we have the dragon slayer. I’ve still got to put his sword up.”
Pimm spends about five weeks setting up the front yard display. She has some help, especially with the computerized lights and music. And each year, she spends more than $1,000, she said, adding to or modifying the display.
What led to this holiday fervor?
"My family didn't decorate for Halloween," she says.
Her dad was a migrant worker, so she grew up on farms, and moved around the country a lot.
“I mean, we had Christmas,” she says, “but it was just a Christmas tree. You know, like I said, migrant work doesn't give a lot of money.”
But Halloween Night was special.
“My family would take us into more prominent areas to go trick or treating,” she says. “And I would look at all the houses and I really said, ‘God, one day I'm gonna do that.’
“And then as I had children, it started to grow from there. It’s like, ‘Well, I want to decorate and decorate and decorate.’ And it just got bigger and bigger and bigger.”
So big that she can’t put everything out every year. The skeletons alone fill the crawl space beneath the house.
“It is ridiculous when all this goes under there. I mean, God forbid somebody go under there to fix like the furnace or something. They'd be scared out of their minds because there's a bunch of skeletons," she says, breaking into a laugh that is half childlike giggles.
Pimm’s own children are grown now. But she gives no indication of slowing down.
“It gets a little bit more difficult each year because it’s tiring to pull it all out as I get older,” she says.
Some of the pieces are concrete and heavy. Others are massive and unwieldly.
“But it's still fun, it’s still fun,” she says.
The past couple of years, she has taken up donations – not to offset costs but for charity, in memory of lost loved ones.
And when Leo and some of the other kids stop by, they or their parents leave notes – about their favorite decorations, or to say thank you.
Leo will proudly point out one of his notes, pinned to the garage door. Pimm hangs the other notes up inside the house – and keeps them up, all year long.
“That's kind of the best part about it,” she says.
Come Halloween night, she will dress up and hand out candy. This year, she’ll be the evil queen Maleficent. She jokes that the neighbors complain that they have to buy four times more candy since she moved in -- for all the extra trick-or-treaters.
Come Nov. 1, this gets torn down, the yard gets cleaned up, and work begins on a Christmas display.
But for now … it's Halloween.
“It's fun,” Pimm says. “It makes children and adults remember what it is to be just young and you know, fun. And without all the drama that happens in the world.
“You forget it for that moment.”
