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Fair warning: the King of the Underworld has taken up residence for the Halloween season at 233 Cypress Lane in San Juan Bautista, and he has brought a trove of ghosts, spirits and other denizens of the dark with him.
They are all haunting the home of Gem and Chris Sheridan, howling and shrieking and illuminating the Copperleaf subdivision, much to the delight of their neighbors.
“Watching them put it together the first year, I knew it was going to be fabulous,” neighbor Jose Bocanegra said. “It’s a wonderful thing for the children, and for us adults, too. It’s a beautiful display, just gorgeous.”
The Sheridans have been gathering their Halloween items for more than 30 years, adding to their collection each year in what seems like an almost infinite archive of props and figures.
“We decorate really, really big every year,” Gem said. “If you saw it when we had put up only about 15 or 20 percent of what we have, you might say, ‘Stop now, you’re good. You don’t need to do any more.’ But every year we try to push and push and get even more things out.”
Creating these displays from more than 700 items the couple has collected, Gem said, brings her back to her childhood, when the decorated houses during the holidays in her neighborhood rose to high art.
“Our parents used to drive us around,” she said. “We would search for the houses, and you’d just watch them. And sometimes the people there would have hot chocolate or whatnot. We are trying to create that same nostalgic feeling.”
Chris Sheridan said the process of assembling the displays begins at the end of September, when the pieces come out of storage, and a few new things are added. With this extensive palette of lighting, animatronics, fog, smoke and sounds, the couple develop a sensory experience with its own mythology.
The key piece is the King of the Underworld, a grim reaper who can be seen casting his eye on the visitors below from the second-floor loft window.
“When everyone asks where we store all this stuff,” Gem said, “We say we don’t store anything. They all live underground, and they come out once a year. And the King of the Underworld, he’s the one that comes out first.”
The king’s able assistant is Chris’s favorite piece: a seven-foot-tall animatronic plague doctor at the top of the staircase leading to the porch, who periodically bellows out something vaguely threatening.
“He gathers the sick and the dead,” Gem said, “and then he takes them to the King of the Underworld. Everybody that’s in the display has a story, and the plague doctor has collected each and every one.”
Take Samantha, for example, who looks out from a window above the living room holding a lollipop.
“She’ll greet everybody who comes by,” Gem said. “She’s very caring and giving, and she likes to show off by making her head spin in circles and screaming really loud.”
There’s Holly, a young girl in a red dress who stands on the front porch railing, anxious to lure you into playing with her. And just to the side of her is a “sweet girl of the prairie” who loved to read books and tell stories until one day she caught the plague and, as Gem said, was collected by the plague doctor to become a part of the decorations.
Gem said that if the display can invoke people’s earliest memories of Halloween, then she and her husband consider it worthwhile. Their goal, she said, is to encourage people to step away from their devices for a moment and into a world where they can become a kid again.
“When you get people responding in that way, it kind of validates you,” Gem said. “We had someone drive all the way from Half Moon Bay just to see our house. Experiences like that give us so much energy and so many good vibes.”
Things go into high gear with the Sheridans on Halloween day, when they bring out tables to create displays from things that didn’t fit on the house this year. It’s also their last chance to go truly overboard in both tricking and treating the neighborhood.
“We just want to let people know, if you like Halloween, swing on over,” Gem said. “We do full-size candy bars, hang out with everyone, provide popcorn and things for the adults and drinks like apple juice for the kids.”
Shortly after dismantling this year’s display, the Sheridans will start a similar effort to decorate the house for Christmas, including metal candy cane sculptures fabricated by Chris, who is a pipe fitter. It’s an exhibition, Gem said, that has even more emotional impact on people than their house of scares.
“A car stopped in front of our house last Christmas,” she said. “It was there for a long time. We walked over, and it was a guy in his 50s who had started crying. He said, ‘I wanted to thank you guys for doing what you do because this really takes me back. It’s so very nostalgic for me.’”
Despite the noise, traffic and barrage of lights, the neighbors seem to be overjoyed by these annual displays.
“It’s an honor to have them here,” Bocanegra said. “It’s hard to describe the enjoyment they get out of doing this and how they pass it on to everyone.”
The Sheridans’ Halloween Extravaganza is located at 233 Cypress Lane in San Juan Bautista. The lights, animatronics, sound effects and fog machines are operating from 7:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. every evening through Halloween.
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