While turning 40 can be a scary milestone for some, Valerie Mouser of Camas wanted to bring some fright to others on her special day.
Since her birthday comes a week after Halloween, she decided to throw herself a party. Fittingly enough, the party itself was dressed up.
“It was a perfect disguise,” she wrote in an email. “I got to be the center of attention, due to my decorations, and no one was the wiser that it was actually my birthday party.”
That was in 2006. In the years since, Mouser’s Halloween party has become a tradition, with Mouser spending about two weeks working until early mornings on all of her decorations. In the past, her home has been filled with glowing skeletons and a torture chamber, but this year Mouser went a bit “overboard,” in her own words.
Inspired by a creepy doll she saw in a vacation rental, Mouser decided to theme her Halloween party “House of 1,000 Faces” this year. The only problem then was finding the faces.
“As fall was beginning, I sent out a request on Facebook for dolls, and no one responded,” she wrote in an email. “After searching eBay and local thrift stores, I became very discouraged due to the cost and lack of older creepy dolls. So in a last-ditch effort, I posted an ad on Craigslist.”
Craigslist users came through. A man told Mouser he had been hired to clear out a home in Gresham, Ore., which belonged to a couple of hoarders. One thing they hoarded was dolls. Mouser visited the home, bringing only a garbage bag. That wasn’t enough. She visited again a few weeks later and left with 16 boxes full of dolls — all for $25.
“Some were so gross I had a hard time bringing them into my garage, let alone home,” she wrote in an email. “The first step was cutting all the heads and arms off the stinky, wet bodies.”
One day while cutting the dolls, Mouser said out loud, “My thumb is so bruised from cutting all these doll heads off” to no one in particular. Her daughter overheard, put it on Facebook, and Mouser said a few of her friends enjoyed hearing about her “painful surgeries.”
Mouser put dolls, doll heads, and doll heads with arms and legs sticking out of them all over her home. Some were mismatches, some were cracked, and some were so dirty they looked like they might as well have crawled out of a grave. She was so pleased with how the decorations came out that she decided to hold a Halloween night open house the week after her Oct. 24 party to show off her work.
She turned the open house into a food drive. Despite a very rainy Halloween, Mouser said 55 people showed up to the open house, and she collected about 20 pounds of food for the Clark County Food Bank.
Mouser was also excited about her decorations because she works with Freecycle, a nonprofit where people recycle items by giving them away to others in the community.
“I was hopeful that I could use the opportunity to help one of my passion projects,” she wrote in an email. “As the Vancouver moderator for Freecycle, I felt it important to show that one man’s idea of garbage was definitely a treasure to others.”
As for the 1,000 faces, Mouser isn’t going to keep them up year-round, but she found a new home for them: the Doll Asylum in Portland.
“The dolls have been saved from going to the landfill once again,” Mouser wrote.
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