Scaring up new neighbors with Halloween decor

Jim Mains spends a lot of time thinking about how to scare people, but last year he feared he might be terrifying the wrong group.

Since he was a child, Mains, 38, covered his family’s — and now his own — home with frightening Halloween decorations. Last year, though, the house across the street was for sale, and potential new neighbors were stopping by to view the home while Mains’ front yard was full of tombstones, cobwebs, bubbling cauldrons and stray body parts.

“I was worried people weren’t going to want to move in,” Mains said.

As it turned out, he had no reason to be nervous. In fact, his decorations helped the Smetherses decide to move to Northwest Franklin Street in Vancouver.

“This is why I moved here,” Diane Smethers said. “It means a lot to me to see someone decorate like this. I grew up in the Midwest, in Chicago, and so many people decorated their houses up like this. I haven’t see this in a while. It gives me a feeling of childhood again. It’s a good, warm feeling.”

The Smetherses looked at their house last year only during Halloween. They weren’t living there on the night of the holiday, the night when Mains’ house really comes alive.

Mains and his wife, Ceci Mains, 30, don’t just decorate their home, located at 4616 N.W. Franklin St., in Vancouver. They have friends and family come over, dress up and scare trick-or-treaters. There are about eight people who typically dress up on Halloween, and they scare guests who try to make it past them up the driveway to the house for candy. In the past, their guests have dressed up like witches, zombies, Michael Myers from “Halloween” and the clown from “It.”

“It’s a full-on theatrical performance,” Jim Mains said.

Most of the scaring takes place in the driveway, where the first 250 trick-or-treaters who are brave enough to make it to the Mainses’ house will receive full-size candy bars. Those who get too scared to make it up the driveway will still receive treats, although not full-size ones. Mains said about 300 trick-or-treaters made it to the house last year, which he estimated was 70 percent of kids who visited.

They make sure to have one “nice” character in case some of the younger kids get too scared. This year, Ceci Mains will dress up as Fiona from “Shrek.” Ceci Mains isn’t too big a fan of the gorier parts of Halloween and said she doesn’t really like scary movies. Still, she doesn’t feel bad about terrifying all the children who visit her house.

“The people who come here know what they’re coming to and are looking for a scare,” she said.

The scariness is what keeps kids coming back. Twins Grace and Lucy Sherman, 14, used to visit the Mainses’ home because their grandmother lived next door. They now live next door and started helping the Mainses set up decorations. Last year, Grace Sherman even participated on Halloween night, dressing up in a white wig and laying in a coffin in the garage trying to scare visitors.

“I tried to act fake,” she said, adding she hoped people would think she was just another decoration, and then she’d pop up from the coffin.

Mains said that guests knowing people are dressed up and walking around works to their advantage. He said it makes the decorations even more frightening, since guests think some are real people in costume. A new addition last year was a skeleton in the driver’s seat of a green pickup truck parked on the grass between the Mainses and their next door neighbor. They threw a blanket around the skeleton’s body and put a green light in the truck, and people were convinced that was another actor who was preparing to jump out at them.

A new decoration this year is a giant spider crawling up a tree in the Mainses’ front yard, with plastic-wrapped body parts hanging in the spider’s web. It’s the creepiest of all their decorations, according to Ceci Mains. Another new aspect to this year’s Halloween is that the Mainses are going to donate $1 to a local nonprofit for every trick-or-treater who visits their house. Since announcing his plan, Jim Mains said, six nonprofits have contacted him, but he and his wife haven’t decided on which organization do donate to. The Mainses are doing that in honor of community leader Ed Lynch, who died in May and with whom they both worked.

There is also some technology involved with the decorations. Spooky music plays through a sound system, and one of the second-story windows shows creepy videos of graveyards, bats and a silhouette of a man walking around. There will also be a laser-light display on the side of the house.

Still, the Mainses don’t want to over-scare their guests. The actors used to sometimes follow trick-or-treaters down the street, but they stopped doing that. Jim Mains said sometimes people want to see what’s going on and observe without getting too close, and they don’t want to upset those people. Sometimes, the actors even got into cars with people, but only if they knew the parents, who signaled that it was OK.

“I think the parents used that as punishment if the kids were bad,” Ceci Mains said.

Jim Mains said he always liked decorating for holidays partly because it’s fun and partly because he’s excited to share his holiday spirit with the community. As he’s grown older, he’s channeled that enthusiasm in ways a bit more palatable to his neighbors.

“When I was younger and decorating my parents house, I used to make the tombstones for our lawn,” he said. “Each one would have a poem, a little rhyme about one of the neighbors. That didn’t go over too well.”

Now, he said, it’s easier to buy the tombstone decorations for his own house, and the names on them have no connection to anyone he knows. That zeal for celebrating with his community is still there, though, and Mains’ newest neighbors are ready for a front-row seat to whatever is going to happen.

“People keep telling us how great Halloween night is,” Smethers said. “We still don’t really know what to expect, but there are going to be a lot of people. I keep buying candy. We must have about seven bags. We can’t wait to see everything.”