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SPOOKTACULAR! WHEN IT COMES TO DECORATING FOR HALLOWEEN, THERE'S SIMPLY NO STOPPING SOME PEOPLE

BY LYNDA EDWARDS Staff Writer Oct 29, 1999 Updated Jan 25, 2015

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Mannequin corpses swing from the trees arching over the dirt road. The narrow wooden bridge creaks under the car wheels. If you survive the twisty drive, there's a payoff at the top of the high hill.

A historic log mansion in Julian, the home of Ryan and Lora Routh, is ablaze with Halloween decorations, outshining the surrounding gold and rust forest. Hay bales and bound cornstalks decorate the porch. Orange pumpkin lights and red apples festoon the metal roof over an old stone wishing well. White skeleton head lights frame the windows. Ghosts (well, sheets) waft from the shade trees.The front door opens onto a long, sweeping hall. Fake cobwebs and spiders drift from the vaulted ceilings and beams. Enormous jack-o'-lanterns and green, black and white candles glow from every available flat surface. The rows of windows lining the house spill light across the lawn.

Halloween decorations with the harvest theme suit the house's personality perfectly,' Lora Routh says. She and her husband deck the halls at Christmas.But Halloween colors, orange, black, white, set off beautifully against the house's dark gray logs, more than red ribbons or evergreen.'

And Christmas is a visually more conservative holiday, she says: ``You can get flashy without being disrespectful at Halloween.'

Halloween has become the second biggest spending spree after Christmas, with sales reaching $2.4 billion, according to the National Retailers Federation.

``In a flush economy, we see adults, even those without kids, whose Halloween decoration is a form of entertainment,' said federation vice president Pam Rucker.

And it's tough to translate July 4 legends into dime-store adornments, she adds.

The Target store on Lawndale Avenue is almost a Halloween bazaar, with five aisles of lights, dolls, cardboard cutouts, costumes, robotic toys and candles shaped like more ghouls, monsters and demons than Edgar Allan Poe and Wes Craven could dream up together.

The Rouths' decorations don't look store-bought. They are more likeadornments made by homebody pagans. And they were a hit with the 150 children who attended the Rouths' Halloween party.

The kids built a graham cracker and chocolate icing haunted house complete with Oreo cookie gravel and marshmallow graves. They loved the toy table-top vampire who sits up in a coffin, cackles and spins his eyes. They jerked the strings on the dancing skeletons hanging in the apple orchard. They tolerated the costumed grown-ups who leaped from behind trees.