Ohio man builds giant skeleton bursting through his house for Halloween

Ohio homeowner Alan Perkins worked his fingers to all kinds of bones for Halloween this year and built a terrifyingly gigantic skeleton display.

A skull with one protruding eyeball stares out from his roof as one of its hands breaks through a window to clutch the awning for support. Its other hand reaches around the house and grabs onto a smaller, soul-stirring figure.

"I have an oversized skeleton that's basically breaking out of my home," Perkins told As It Happens guest host Peter Armstrong.

He put together a few other large-scale displays in the past, including a Batmobile made out of Lego pieces that his son could fit inside. That didn't quite catch on with the public, he said, and so this year he wanted to lure more people in.

A few years ago, Perkins saw a picture of a Christmas tree that looked like it was poking through the roof of someone's home, as if they had badly miscalculated and bought the wrong-sized tree.

He twisted that idea into this year's Halloween display.

Perkins bought the 12-foot-long skeletons from Home Depot, but he had to make the giant show-stopper himself.

Using polystyrene sheets and a chainsaw, he carved the giant skeleton's skull and hands. Then he used a curry comb, normally used to brush horse hair, to sharpen its features and smooth out the foam.

He then used PVC to make the inner frame of the skeleton's arm, which he later covered with more foam. 

When it was time to raise the bones above the house, Perkins realized he designed it on an angle that didn't match his roof line.

"I got it close, and then I brought up plywood and actual bundles of shingles and tarp paper and I basically built the roof around it without damaging my own…. It [looked] like it truly was coming through the roof," he said.

The entire build took him 40 days.

"It just was something that I thought was whimsical and fun. And apparently other people did as well," Perkins said.

The Perkins house sits on a small road with few neighbours, connecting to a commercial area in Olmsted Falls, Ohio. Around 20 trick or treaters visited them in previous years, but the homeowner has no clue how many to expect this weekend.

"I don't know if I'm going to have a whole bunch of people driving up, stopping as they have been doing the last 10 days and, you know, dropping their kids off, hoping they get candy," he said, "Or if ... [it's] just lots of people coming by to take pictures later. I truly have no idea how to plan for this."

His two kids are happy to have "the cool house" at school that their classmates talk about. His wife, on the other hand, does not rank Halloween as one of her favourite holidays.

Online, their spooky skeleton house has gone viral and amid all the attention Perkins connected with a community of "home haunters" across the United States using their displays to raise funds for St. Jude's Children's Hospital.

For all the work he put into it, though, the decorations will come down and the haunting will end after Halloween.

Perkins said that he could probably repurpose the skeleton into a Santa, but he won't.

"I think if I had my decorations up into Thanksgiving … my wife would be rather upset with that," he said. "So we will tastefully decorate our house for Christmas, but there will be no giant skeleton involved."

Written by Mehek Mazhar. Interview with Alan Perkins produced by John McGill.