These three homes have Halloween yard displays to die for

Some people look at a skeleton and think, well, death.

Graham Mabon looks at that same collection of bones and thinks: the life of the party.

Wander into Mabon’s Old Irving Park neighborhood at this time of year, and you’ll find plenty of plastic skeletons big and small. His five-foot-tall skeleton leans, grinning, from Mabon’s second-floor balcony — fingers working twin turntables, headphones clapped over its skull and a disco ball glittering above.

“I naturally thought the dang thing should do something,” said Mabon, 52, who works in cyber security.

Mabon is one of a number of homeowners in and around the Chicago area who aren’t satisfied with simply slinging a fake web and plastic spiders across the front yard or spending a small fortune buying ready-made jump-scare creations. They share another important trait: the need (or maybe the obsession) to create something that wouldn’t look out of place in a professional haunted house or on a downtown stage.

3630 N. Keeler Ave.

When the sun goes down, Mabon’s house is transformed into a Halloween-themed faux nightclub, complete with booming music, colored lights and even a velvet rope. Mabon and his wife, Dawn Armstrong, even plan to dress up in black “Security” t-shirts to escort the V.I.P. kiddos along a red carpet to the candy stash on the big day.

The skeletal hands on Mabon’s turntables actually move, creating the illusion that his “D.J.” is scratching and mixing the sounds blasting out of Mabon’s speakers. He said the display took him about a week to put together, working two to three hours a night, and cost about $500.

He said he wanted to put his skeleton “out of the way” on the second floor to accommodate the hordes of kids he’s expecting; they’ve herded through as many as 1,300 in years past, he said.

Then he thought, “If the skeleton was up there [on the balcony] and it was moving, what would it be doing?”

A few years ago, Mabon built a system of pulleys, bicycle wheels and fishing lines to create the illusion of witches and ghosts flying above his visitors’ heads.

“It worked for two years, but it was a labor of love — welding and putting together stuff to work, and I just wanted something that would be entertaining and easier to do and less risk of falling off from high heights,” he said.

818 Monroe St., Evanston

Patty Spata and Steve Wilke’s Evanston front yard looks like an Edgar Allan Poe short story come to life.

Scattered upon the season’s withering plant life, the couple have erected a macabre art gallery: a thrift store still life to which Spata has seamlessly added a severed Medusa head; a copy of the Mona Lisa, her smiling face replaced with a skull and the painting’s title renamed “Moaning Lisa.” A dead shrub has become a netherworld creature — a nightmare of spiky, jutting limbs and platinum blonde hair.

Spata and Wilke, together with Spata’s cousin Linda Goltz, have been at this for about 25 years. Spata’s mind goes to work each year while she’s sitting on a little bench opposite her front yard, often a full year before Halloween. Spata is a retired hair stylist, Wilke a sound engineer and music composer.

“They were nice little dolls until they came to our house,” Spata jokes, gesturing toward a display of five dolls, blood streaming out of their eyes down chalk-white faces.

Past themes have included a “dark queen’s funeral,” a wedding and a Victorian masquerade ball.

Besides combing through thrift stores, the couple scour alleyways and depend on the kindness of friends and neighbors for the objects that end up in their garden for Halloween. So it’s almost impossible to put a price on the display, the couple says.

The house draws hundreds of curious visitors, the couple says.

“The police come down the street playing [Michael Jackson’s] ‘Thriller,’” Wilke said.

The display is so scary, it’s not hard to imagine the littlest ones debating whether to risk the trip up the steps for candy.

“If they walk up the stairs and they’re too scared, then I’ve done my job,” Spata said.

2920 W. Wilson Ave.

Stroll past Kevin Byrne’s creations and, unless you’re in the theater or movie business, you’ll likely wonder: How on earth did he do that?

Four faceless evil spirits — think the Ringwraiths from “The Lord of the Rings” or the Harry Potter Dementors — appear to float like smoke above the flowerbeds around Byrne’s otherwise perfectly normal Ravenswood Manor bungalow.

The largest evil spirit, which looks as though it is oozing out of the bungalow basement, is 16 feet long.

In previous years, Byrne recruited family and friends as models to create zombies, which involved Byrne wrapping the volunteers in plastic wrap and duct tape and then carefully cutting them out.

The trick for the evil spirits, Byrne says, is super light-weight materials — foam wall insulation cut to size and bulked out with chicken wire, then covered with fabric. The “floating” spirits are held in place with exceptionally strong fishing line that, unless you’re staring, you likely won’t notice.

“I really like the problem-solving part,” said Byrne, who works in analytics.

For Byrne, less is more. He estimates he spent about $300 on his display, shopping at Etsy, Home Depot and Evanston’s Vogue Fabrics, among other places.

“I see people who buy a lot of things and their yard is jam-packed, but maybe one creepy figure standing in the middle of the yard dressed in a clown costume or whatever it is, that might be creepier than having 15 different things with LEDs and [being] motion-activated,” Byrne said.