Decorating is in the blood of Tammy Stephenson and her son Dylan Diestel, so to speak. The pair used a lot of sweat and fears to create a hauntingly good tribute to All Hallows Eve.
“We have always decorated for Halloween,” Stephenson said, sitting on her front porch looking out over all she and Diestel had created in the yard of their home on Bell and Rice. “But we have really gone all out for the past 10 years.”
That is no understatement for this year’s creation as a trip by their yard will prove.
On the Rice Street side of the yard, a giant spider has caught a hapless human for her little ones to feed on.
In the front yard on Bell Avenue, a gravedigger stands in his shed pondering where to dig next. At night those roaming about can hear the gravedigger muttering about his nightly chores as he stands near those already buried. It’s a real bone yard with fellows like Coldin Burried and Rigg R. Mortise interred there.
If you’re ever near his corner of Rockdale, you might hear him say, “Most of the time when I bury a body, they stay buried. But every now and then, one pops up and grabs you. You’d best run along before another one of them gets antsy.”
There is a mean-looking witch on the front porch, but she can’t be as mean as she looks since she is ready to “hand out” candy. But trick-or-treaters don’t have to go near her as Stephenson made a pulley system to deliver the treats to those seeking them with COVID-19 social distancing in mind.
“We rigged it up to hand out the candy from a distance. It runs from the porch to the light pole so the kids don’t have to come up from the road,” Stephenson said.
Still, that spider on the side of the house is the head turner in a yard full of Halloween characters.
“It took about a week to pull it all together,” Diestel said. “We knew that the spider was going to take the longest, so we did that first.”
The spider and her babies are actually foam, chicken wire, pool noodles and PVC pipes, they said.
The “human” hanging in the spider’s web is a dummy from the house’s attic.
“It would really creep people out if they went into our attic,” Stephenson said.
But the attic is the storehouse of tools the two use to fuel their decorating imaginations.
“We try to use whatever we have on hand,” Stephenson said.
Some years there have been themes to the yard’s decor. Like last year’s Hansel and Gretel yard with candy everywhere.
“We had the grandkids and didn’t want to scare them too much,” Stephenson said.
But there was a witch half in the oven and the boy in the cage, she noted.
Other themes over the years have been alien invasion, creepy clowns and zombies, they said.
Neither one has any design training, although Diestel, a 2019 graduate of Rockdale High School, hopes to get a job soon to earn some money to go to the Art Institute of Austin to study video game design.
“I have always been a jack of all trades, master of none,” said Stephenson, who has a variety of duties at Rockdale Welding Supply.
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.