Spooktacular: Handyman puts his stamp on decorating North End home for Halloween

Ed Stark is like a kid at Christmas.

Or Halloween.

Stark's front yard in the 700 block of Eastman Avenue near the railroad tracks at Eighth Street, with its collection of 12-foot skeletons, tombstones, and aluminum columns topped with vultures and spider webs, is hard to miss.

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It's also part of his handiwork.

"I sit back here at nighttime, and I look at it and the wheels start turning in my head," said Stark, who does home maintenance and home repairs for a living. "Once I see (a design) in my head, I can make it."

Stark has been counting down the days to Halloween with a sign in his yard since the Fourth of July, when he outfitted one of his large skeletons in an Uncle Sam getup.

When it comes to decorating for Halloween, Stark isn't alone.

The National Retail Federation estimated Americans spent a record $10.6 billion on the holiday, everything from decorations to costumes to candy to greeting cards, last year.

Over two-thirds of Americans said they planned to take part in Halloween celebrations, spending an average of a little over $100 in the process, the NRF further detailed.

Stark, 59, said he will put up about 1,000 store-bought spiders in various poses around the yard. The skeletons are store-bought, too, and Stark is part of an online group of owners of 12-foot skeletons who exchange decorating ideas.

When it comes to spider webs, Stark is the "web designer" and builder. Some larger webs can take up to eight hours to construct, Stark said. He learned to make them from a former brother-in-law and by online tutorials.

The North End attraction went viral last year when several people posted it on Facebook and now visitors make it part of a daily pilgrimage in part because Stark said he is keen to change things up.

"I don't like throwing it out all at one time," Stark said. "I'll do little by little by little, so that way when people drive by, they see something different all the time."

Stark's neighbor, Jason Penner, looking after his 4-year-old son, Jaxson, said he marvels at the setup.

"You can sit there all day long," Penner said, "and never see the same thing twice. Jaxson, he'll pick up things I didn't see, even after 15 times looking at it."

Nicholas Nguyen, who lives across the street from Stark, said his kids especially like watching the decorations go up.

"Every year it changes, more and more, and at night it's awesome," Nguyen said during a break from a Zoom conference. "I can look out the window and see it, so I don't have to decorate my house."

Stark said he started decorating about 15 years or so ago when he was living with his then-girlfriend on Stephens Avenue.

He strung a web between two large pine trees and populated it with spiders, making it look like something, he said, "out of a Stephen King movie."

That was mere child's play, now that Stark employs special lighting and a fog machine to make those 12-foot skeletons even more imposing.

"If you put a big skeleton out there, you have to put a big show on," Stark said. "This has got to be the biggest and baddest year."

That "Keep Out" warning spray-painted on the front of Stark's house?

Stark was replacing a cream-colored siding with dark-colored siding--the spider webs didn't show up that well against the old siding--but when he got to the front of the house, the exposed wood boards provided an effect he couldn't resist.

"I looked up at the house and I said, 'This is perfect. I'm going to leave it like this for Halloween,'" Stark recalled.

That was two years ago.

Ironically, Stark said he grew up without Halloween. His mother was Jehovah's Witness, a religion that does not celebrate Halloween, or All Hallow's Eve, because of ties to "occultism​—including astrology," according to jw.org.

Stark draws the line at blood and gore and demons. Admittedly, the attractions are spooky, but still kid-friendly, he insisted.

"It's fun, and it's an expression of his art," said Jennifer Kamm, Stark's girlfriend.

Stark has his family, including son, Steve, daughter, Samantha, and five grandchildren, in on the fun, too.

"They all know what they're getting in their inheritances: spiders and skeletons," Stark said. "They just laugh. It's just Dad being Dad."

Contact Steven Spearie: (217) 622-1788; sspearie@sj-r.com; X, twitter.com/@StevenSpearie.

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Springfield's Ed Stark puts personal touch on decorating for Halloween