BY MATT KITE for WEEKLY VOLCANO 10-31-25 |
In Tacoma’s North End neighborhood, just a few blocks east of the University of Puget Sound, residents have turned yard haunts into an art. Custom-built monsters. Animatronic spooks. Frightening and fantastic themes. Each house averages 500 or more trick-or-treaters every Halloween.
Located near the epicenter of the mayhem, on N. Oakes Street near N. 14th, is what we’ll call the Head House. Emily Seaholm, the mad scientist behind the creation, began building life-sized figures with enormous papier-mâché heads fifteen years ago. Now she has a yard and planting strip full of creatures and critters. Some, like E.T. and Chucky, are from Hollywood. Others, like Little Pig and the Headless Horseman, come from folklore. Still others are inspired by art masterpieces, including Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Grant Wood’s American Gothic. With the help of her children, Emily has created an up-lit fantasyland where passersby can vote on their favorite figures.
“This started in 2010 with a pumpkin and werewolf,” Emily says. “Every year we try to add a new one or two.”
Emily’s process has evolved over time. The first papier-mâché head, a pumpkin, was made of cardboard and covered with papier-mâché and varnish. Later, she started using latex or high-quality outdoor paint. Still later, she added a polyurethane finish. Now she adds a coat of RedGard sealant as a waterproofing membrane and then paints over it.
The heads are removed each night before bedtime and on rainy days and stored inside to help preserve them for Halloween night. A huge rendering of Sully from Monsters, Inc. will be staged on the front porch to dispense full-sized candy bars to trick-or-treaters.
“I didn’t enjoy Halloween growing up as a kid,” Emily says. “Now it’s my favorite holiday.”
A few blocks away, on N. Junett Street near N. 11th, Tracy Dillon has turned his old Craftsman into a pirate ship, complete with a shark-infested lawn, a shipwreck in the planting strip, a kraken devouring a ship, and a skeleton-manned crow’s nest on the roof. Years ago, Tracy was a member of the Point Defiance Pirates, an entertainment group for local events and festivals. Now he’s pouring his creativity into his pirate display, which features smoke bombs, tiki torches, a fire pit, black-powder pistols, and a crow-counting contest for the kids. He makes all of the props himself and, with the help of his family, packs more than 400 bags with Pirate’s Booty and other treats for the trick-or-treaters.
“It started with the main rigging and the cannon, which is made from a church pew and a scuba cylinder,” Tracy says. “I just kept adding little things. The net, the pirates, the pylons, the crow’s nest up on top.”
Of course, nothing is scarier than a clown. At the Killer Klown House, located on N. Fife Street near N. 14th, Mallory Trujillo has decorated the west-facing side of her home with nothing but clowns. The inspiration? The 1988 cult-classic horror-comedy film Killer Klowns from Outer Space. A huge fan of the movie, Mallory met an artist who created one of the film’s spooky masks, and she even landed a prop from the set: a cotton-candy cocoon with a victim trapped inside. Mallory, who waits until Halloween day to complete her haunt, says the neighborhood grows spookier and more outlandish every year.
“I feel like we’re slightly artsy, slightly eccentric,” she explains. “We’re all in our forties, people feeding off each other. Some people will start with a little bit, and then now they’ve gotten a lot bigger. You see the kids get really excited about it.”
Nearby, on N. 12th near N. Cedar, lurks the Whimsical House. Maybe it’s the opposing armies of horse-mounted Barbies on the lawn. Or maybe it’s the gunny sack creatures inspired by a popular video game. The brainchild of Brian Brandt defies description.
“It all started with the kids when they were young and just plastic skeletons laying on the lawn and stuff like that,” Brian says, “and it sort of evolved from there. We wanted to be artsy with stuff, so we’ve moved away from buying a lot of stuff and went the homemade route. I go to the Goodwill bins. That’s where I get a ton of stuff, and we’ve done 3D printing with the kids with the 4-H program, so then I just get ideas from different things.”
Ever resourceful, Brian made a spooky well from material from Habitat for Humanity and found a coffin with a “free” sign on it on the side of the road. When rats ate the papier-mâché head of Big Red, a homemade monster big enough to step inside, Brian replaced it with an enormous skull. He always gives out full-sized candy bars, and one year he rewarded the hundredth trick-or-treater with a five-pound candy bar. As the big day nears, more props find their way to the front yard, including two giant arches made of pumpkins and bones, two Halloween-themed light posts, and a gargantuan snake whose sprawling body is made from used crawl-through tunnels. Several displays, including the United Scary Postal Service, the Phantom Federal Reserve Bank, and the Haunted Pet Store, are marked with signs and witty descriptions.
