Guilford family turns lawn into cemetery for Halloween

Forget the Miracle on 34th Street. How about Greenway, where the Godey family has transformed its spacious front lawn into a cemetery guarded by ghosts, bats, Dracula, and a well-dressed, wise-cracking ghoul with bright red eyes?

Real estate attorney Jim Godey and his wife, Tracy, moved to Guilford from Annapolis this summer with their 5-year-old daughter, Catelyn, and 12-yar-old stepson Connor Mitchell and they're already a hit in the neighborhood.

So popular is their Halloween tableau that at dusk Oct. 24, motorists stopped in the street to stare and caused backups, a la 34th Street in Hampden, where Halloween decorations are becoming as big a deal as the famed Christmas lights.

"Love it! Love it!" Guilford resident Joan Royals yelled out her window to the Godeys.

"This is amazing," said Jenny Sorel, of Oakenshawe.

The Godeys began their Halloween obsession in Annapolis.

"It started a couple of years ago with a couple of decorations at our old home, and we just kept adding," Tracy Godey said.

Now the family has brought their Annapolis tradition with them — a bunch of inflatable, outsized characters.

One is Dracula, who pops up and down in his coffin inside a horse-drawn coach.

Another, which Tracy named "The Bobblehead," has the ability to spin its giant eyes and open and close its mouth.

Yet another is the deadpan ghoul, who stands at the front door like a servant, dressed in a tuxedo and top hat. He is partial to programmed one-liners like: "I thought working your fingers to the bone was a figure of speech," or "Glad to see you. Things were just dead before you showed up."

The piece de resistance is an inflatable cemetery, smack in the middle of the lawn.

And playing over and over in the background is the refrain of the creepy theme music from the "Halloween" movies.

There's even a fog machine.

The family only inflates the characters for a few hours each night because they don't want to run up their electric bill or wear out their welcome with the neighbors and the Guilford Association.

The Godeys bought their decorations online and at big-box and specialty stores as far away as Glen Burnie.

Jim said it took him about a week to set up the Halloween dead zone, which also includes bats hanging from gutters. He jokingly likened the results to "a flea market."

The kids, of course, love it and are primed for Halloween. Catelyn, a kindergartner at the School of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, was already wearing her giraffe costume Monday night — the same one she'll wear when she goes trick or treating.

What will the family do for an encore? Check back closer to Christmas, when the Godeys will drag out a giant sled, with an elf catching packages.

They paid $1,000 for the sled.

"A little ridiculous, I know," Jim said.

But, as his wife observed, "It brings a lot of people joy."