Monday, Oct. 26, 2009

Halloween is in their blood: Belleville family's backyard is a real nightmare

A stroll through John Baumann's backyard makes you wonder if he has a little werewolf in him.

The Belleville man spends two months a year building elaborately ghoulish Halloween scenes that rival professional displays.

Rats chew on a severed head next to a guillotine. A bloody demon bursts out of a coffin in a mausoleum. Corpses glare from a wooden stockade. A bat spins in the window of a stone castle. Giant spiders hang from trees.

"Nobody goes this crazy that I know of," said John's friend Barry Jones, 47, of Belleville. "He doesn't go halfway. He goes all the way."

Perhaps most impressive is the electric chair, complete with a bundle of heavy-duty power cords leading from conductors to the master switch.

A skeleton with stringy gray hair sits with a metal ring around his head and shackles on his hands and ankles. A grim reaper flips the switch, causing a plasma ball in the prisoner's skull to light up and strobes to flash.

"It's wicked," said John, 42, a mechanic. "It looks like he's frying from the inside out."

John and his companion, Joy Burton, have a blended family of 10. Five of their eight children live with them on North 17th Street in Belleville.

You can't see the 200-by-60-foot Halloween display from the road. The family does all the work for a private party that attracts nearly 100 friends, relatives and neighbors.

"It's more of an event than a party," said John's father, Hans Baumann, 64, of Swansea. "People look forward to it all year."

About half the guests wear costumes. They sit on hay bales around a 12-foot-diameter fire pit made of concrete blocks. Tree stumps serve as end tables.

Snacks line picnic tables in the castle, decorated with creepy paintings and party lights shaped like ghosts and eyeballs. A life-size coffin holds the beer keg.

"It's real laid-back," Hans said. "It's not rowdy. It's just very sociable. Usually, people spend the first half-hour studying everything and trying to figure out what's new. They'll say, 'Oh my God,' or 'Look at that!'"

The display is surrounded by a rickety wooden fence, and an outhouse door allows access to the woods beyond the yard.

This is the seventh year for the party, which started with a few people sitting around a bonfire in 2003.

John began adding decorations each year with help from Joy and the children: Christopher "Meatball" Burton, 10, Stephanie Burton, 12, Tiffany Burton, 13, Carly Maynor, 14, Mike Leeper, 15, Tommy "T.J." Mattingly, 19, Brittany Hamilton, 20, and Tabatha Hamilton, 20.

"It's a tradition for the whole family," said Joy, 39. "The kids even tell Daddy that when they move and have their own families, he has to keep doing this."

After Party No. 3, the castle became a permanent fixture in the yard. It's garage-size with a 24-by-14-foot plywood facade painted to look like stone and a fire-breathing skull over the door.

The family later added a bone yard, butcher shop and meat grinder with a bloody leg sticking up; a devil crawling out of a hollow stump; a wooden shanty with a witch's broom, bone wind chime and black cat on the porch; and a blow-up Frankenstein and horse-drawn hearse.

John builds most of the scenery and props from scratch, using lumber, metal and other items he finds while "dumpster diving."

"He's one of those people who has to be occupied and has to have a goal," said his father, Hans. "He just can't sit still."

John's big project this fall was a wooden well with a severed head on the rope. A pump sends "blood" spurting out the ears, nose and mouth.

John's main helper is son Mike, who finished the cemetery last week by stringing cobwebs between tombstones and crosses.

"I just like to get into this type of stuff," Mike said. "It's fun to do. It's better than sitting around watching TV."