Home Depot’s 12-Foot Skeleton Took Over Halloween 2020. Here’s How That Happened.

From Esquire

As the latter months of 2020 materialized, it looked as if the year would be a complete wash with nary a bright spot. (See: well, everything.) But then, something magical happened. Something spooky. Something big.

Yes, here to save us from the worst year ever was the nation’s latest superstar: the 12-Foot Giant-Sized Skeleton with LifeEyes, courtesy of a certain orange-logoed home retailer, the Home Depot. A tower of bones topped off with a typically skeleton-y face and glowing, ever-moving LCD eyes, this sucker was tall. Really tall. Think: six feet, and then another six feet on top of that. Your arithmetic does not deceive you. This skeleton was the height of two Timothée Chalamets.

In short order, the 12-foot-tall skeleton followed in the smaller steps of Baby Yoda and transformed into a viral star. Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok lit up with footage of users’ own 12-foot skeletons and sightings of the skeleton in the suburban wilds. It was a soothing balm, and grateful citizens have Lance Allen, who holds the official title of Holiday Merchant at the Home Depot, to thank. His job is to stock shelves with items for special occasions, kind of like a multi-holiday Santa. “I’ve been working in merchant roles for a while and have a lot of past experience with tools and cleaning products, and let me tell you, none of them have driven excitement like this,” said Allen of the 12-foot-tall skeleton, in what is perhaps the understatement of the season.

Allen and his team began the process of bringing this skeleton to frightful life way back in the spring of 2019, when the store started prepping for this year’s holiday stock. “We spend a lot of time just walking through trade shows and finding items we could bring to the market that our customers hadn’t seen before,” explained Allen. “We were at one show and just saw a giant torso; it was more of a commercial prop that somebody had made there. We were like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty neat. Imagine if we could design a giant item similar to that, but instead it be a full skeleton?’”

From there, the store’s in-house design team worked to execute their mad plan, sketching it out to-scale on paper. “We really thought we could be onto something,” Allen said. Bernard Scott, Allen’s associate and the Home Depot’s Product Merchant, felt similarly. “My initial reaction was the same as our customers' when they first walk into our stores and see it: ‘Wow!’” he said. “It’s one thing to start with the vision, then watch it develop on paper and through digital files, but nothing can compare to the awe of a 12-foot humanoid structure looming over you.”

By the beginning of this year, the skeleton was patiently waiting to be unleashed onto an unsuspecting public. Then, the coronavirus turned the world upside down. Would it all have been for naught? If so, what would they do with all of the massive boxes of plastic bones? “There were conversations during early April like, ‘Are we even going to have a Halloween? Are we even going to have a Christmas?’” Allen said. “But we realized people needed something to bring a smile to their face, and we knew they could share it safely with their neighbors driving by, so we went ahead with our plans.”

It wasn’t until the Home Depot raised the curtain on its Halloween line on August 1 that Allen and his team got proof that their skeleton would be a hit. “Right when we started posting the photos of our products, when we were setting up our website, you could just see the Halloween forums erupting with excitement,” he said, noting that industry watchers’ eyes lit up (much like the skeleton’s) when they realized something so gosh darn big would be sold for the seemingly low price of 300 bucks. When it went live, sales immediately spiked, according to Allen. Sightings began to tick up across the country. In the past two and a half months, the 12-foot-tall skeleton has been spotted dutifully guarding homes, playing basketball, hanging out at the supermarket, overseeing makeshift cemeteries, taking leisurely drives, and perhaps most disturbingly, becoming the overlord of a bunch of regular-sized skeletons. Brands like Budweiser got in on the action (naturally, Budweiser made a similarly giant beer prop), and AdWeek christened it a marketer’s dream.

Home Depot had itself a bona (boney?) fide cultural phenomena. Allen and his team’s maniacal creation promptly sold out.

While it’s no doubt a feast for the eyes in meme form, an absurd decoration for an absurd year, who would actually, um, buy one? After all, bringing it home from the store is an obstacle, online shipping fees are exorbitant, and storage options are limited. Alas, one of its many owners, a Chicago-based professional cosplayer who goes by Thred Count, had to resort to buying her XL friend on eBay (average price at press time: $1,000) before plopping it in her modest living room. “My apartment isn’t very big, so it’s intrusive in my space to almost a comical level,” she said. “You can’t ignore it.”

As for her plans post-Halloween (like, where to stash it?), hers is a simple solution: Leave it up year-round. “I definitely don’t have the space to put it away, so I think he’s gonna stand there forever, or until I decide to get rid of him,” she said. “I’m also going to decorate it as a Christmas tree.” And in case you were wondering, she named hers, nonsensically, Applebee's.

Just like that, for a brief yet towering moment, a deeply stupid thing gave us a sort of mind vacation from a year of utter calamity. In the wise and cogent words of Thred Count, “This year has sucked so much that people are really fixated on things that are lighthearted and help them forget about everything.” A weary nation gazes upwards, and then upwards a little more, and salutes this 12-foot-tall skeleton.

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