Award-winning author Laurel O’Donnell finds precious time every day to
escape into the medieval world and bring her characters to life in her writing.
Learn more about her and her
books at her website.
Halloween
has always been a special time of year for me and my family. We love to create
our own decorations. Over the years, this has morphed into elaborate
decorations for my front yard.
My
daughter, husband and I made a crypt. It gets really windy in Illinois and the
first crypt we made was smashed when the wind actually lifted the roof off the sides
of the crypt, shifted it and crashed it back onto itself, destroying it. We
rebuilt it, sturdier and heavier. But we always wonder if another windstorm is
going to tear it apart.
In this
picture, you can see the crypt in the background. These two pillars in the
front are our most recent addition to our graveyard. We built a fence made out
of PVC piping and four wooden pillars made of plywood.
When we
start decorating the front yard, the crypt goes out first because it’s really
heavy and it takes three people to move it. The roof is unattached. We move the
sides out first, swinging them back and forth to maneuver them into place. Then,
we lift the roof on and attach twenty-five pound weights to each of the
corners. I also tie the roof to the sides inside the crypt.
In this
picture, we have pounded three stakes into the ground to help the posts resist
the wind. We don’t want the posts falling over. You can also see the gates that
we’ve begun to put up.
In this
picture, the posts and the fence are up and we’ve begun to set up the
tombstones. We made all of our own tombstones. They are plywood cut out and
painted black. Then we added the words in gray and lightly brushed the wood
with gray paint to give the tombstones a weathered look. You can also see that
we’ve begun to set up lighting for the graveyard.
The
finished graveyard is shown at the top of this post. We made the pillars, the fence, the crypt, and the tombstones.
See the ghost in the crypt? We’ve named her Jane. I even made Jane by gluing
pieces of cheesecloth onto a Styrofoam head and wire arms. Over time, she
became very old and ragged, the perfect ghost! We purchased all of the
skeletons to add finishing touches to our graveyard.
See the
gate of the fence? It stays padlocked and closed until Halloween when we open
it to let the dead wander free!
It takes
three-and-half hours to set all of this up. But it’s a lot of fun! My biggest
thrill is to see the cars slow down to look at the graveyard as they pass by.
Speaking of
ghosts, I have a new boxed set of my Lost Souls series out, including Episodes
1 - 4. Just in time for Halloween! Specially priced at 99 cents for the month
of October.
Lost Souls Boxed Set
Souls who refuse to pass into the afterlife become wandering
spirits, trapped between the world of the living and the dead. These are the Lost Souls. Some of these Lost Souls
have banded together, uniting to fight against an evil endangering both their
existence and the safety of the human world they once inhabited. This evil has
taken shape in unholy creatures called the Changed,
beings who were once Lost Souls but who are now dark, dangerous and disturbed
monsters. The Changed feed on the energy of the Lost Souls, growing stronger
with each Lost Soul they drain. The ultimate goal of the Changed is to harness
enough energy to return to the land of the living by possessing the body of a
human. The mission of the Lost Souls is to stop them.
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