Married on Halloween, put up elaborate display every year starting on Oct. 1st.
Usually do a creepy graveyard, but the theme changed last year to creepy carnival and I have a skeleton tightrope walker, a headless clown, ghost pony scarousel (it moves), clown jack in the box (also moves), a giant clown mouth entrance (will likely move this year as I acquired a spinny spiral and I want to make the eyes twirl) and a ticket booth manned by a grim reaper. There is also a freakshow with a spider woman (upper torso is a woman, lower is spider), zombie flamingos, a misfortune teller and a few other little odds and ends. And one of the cars is decorated with polka dots and is parked across the driveway filled with balloons and a clown skeleton behind the wheel.
I have hopes to finish our strong man in time for this year - Frankenzo Stein, the strongest monster alive (it's a Frankenstein monster obviously, but with a strongman's leotard and the old timey weight). And a few more items - performing circus pony skeleton, a few more freakshow items, and maybe a rotten candy/concession stand. Depends on time and energy at this point.
We have a midway games area for our parties - three games of chance. The Dead Duck is those little floating plastic ducks with numbers on the bottoms that match up with a prize bucket number, but their eyes are all X'ed out and they're floating in a coffin. The Zombie BBQ game is a grill with flickering lights and a special zombie zone grill that requires you to toss the body part into the zone to win. The Basket Case game is a basketball goal with a clown blocker and is a timed game - need to make a basket with a beachball in under one minute. The beachballs are crazy bouncy and just barely fit in the basket.
I build 90% of my decorations. I scavenge, haunt (lol) craigslist and use scraps and oops paint and hit tons of garage sales to find things to build all of our props, so I decorate very cheaply and yet end up having the house in the neighborhood that everyone remembers. So I am still doing this frugally, but having a blast and come up with stuff that is VERY unique and memorable. I have folks stop their cars in the street telling me how much they love our house and how their kids are constantly on the lookout for when the stuff starts coming out. It's pretty awesome.
https://youtu.be/4vhr0N6-34c^ghost pony carousel test and you can see the clown mouth and circus tent backdrop in the background.
https://youtu.be/SKk673LeYb4Crappy too short and annoying run through of our setup last year. Was incomplete as we'd basically been drowned with rain over the preceding weeks and had only 2 hours to put up what we could before it got dark and the TOTs came out.
Need to track down other photos (I suck at remembering to take photos and video of the full setup).
