Lincoln couple teaches how to make Halloween props
Eerie music fills the air. Red eyes glower from shrunken skulls atop a chain-link fence. A ghoulish reaper watches over visitors with an eye cast toward the brown rotting corpse hanging nearby.
This is not your ordinary Southeast Community College night class.
This is Halloween Prop Builders, and this gathering of
16 Nebraskans at Irving Recreation Center is ready to learn just how to make monsters, cadavers and creepy crawlers for their very own haunts.
Headmasters Brad and Tracy Moul (rhymes with howl) are longtime connoisseurs of everything Halloween.
“Halloween for us is 365,” Brad says.
He was born on Halloween.
He met his bride (of 10 months) while teaching his very first Halloween Props class — locking eyes over a plastic foam tombstone … well, maybe it wasn’t quite that romantic … but they did become fast friends with a mutual passion for ghouls, goblins and ghastly creatures of undead.
Tracy, who started haunting her family’s yard as a kid, remembers walking into Brad’s first class and discovering: “Oh my God, there are other people like me!”
Explains Brad: “We are Halloween fanatics.”
As are many of the students who take their class.
Ed Bales enrolled for one reason: to learn how to make his own tombstones.
He and his wife began decorating for Halloween back when he was stationed with the military in North Carolina. These days, their frontyard turns ghostly on Halloween night.
Jennifer Grosse, who took the Mouls’ class once before, said she’s b-a-a-a-ck for a tombstone refresher.
The Grosse family lives outside Lincoln’s city limits in the country. Their frontyard display is small and not so spooky, in deference to their 2-year-old.
“My family are funeral directors,” she said. “I grew up around tombstones.”
And like many of her fellow classmates, she opted to take the do-it-yourself path after falling financial victim to too many overpriced, mass-produced, poorly constructed props commonly found in spook shops and chain stores.
That’s how Brad Moul got his start 10 years ago.
“I always enjoyed decorating. But I would look at the mass-produced stuff and found it was cheaply made and not every realistic, and everybody else on the block has the same thing you have,” he said.
So he did what any fiscally responsible fanatic would do. He got on the Web — the World Wide Web, that is.
He found plenty of sites offering how-tos and tips for making everything from graveyards to groaning ghosts and ominous ogres. He relied on his construction experience to modify and manipulate the creatures into one-of-a-kind masterpieces created from unrecognizable materials of chicken wire, PVC piping, acrylic, adhesive and rebar.
For two years they ran the haunted house on 16th Street. And as they traveled the country meeting other happy haunters, they discovered a hidden world of “wish-we-could-do-that” humanoids, which inspired a new Halloween Props class that goes beyond just tombstones to actual 6-foot-long rotting corpses and maniacal creatures created out of a mysterious substance known as “monster mud.”
Teresa Crowder is modifying Moul’s format for a Monster Mud Grim Reaper to create a life-sized troll for the haunted garage and yard she and her husband, Kenny Crowder, conjure up every Halloween at 5330 Orchard St. She replaced the reaper’s skull with an old ogre mask filled with spray plastic foam and is giving him wart-ridden red ogre hands made of latex.
“I was going to use our styrofoam head,” she starts to say, “but we needed it for our antique barber chair …”
Crowder stops and grins … I’ve said enough …
The Crowders have but one goal on Halloween — “We just try to scare as many people as we can,” she said stifling an evil chuckle.
You’d be surprised at how many people flee from the yard and forget to pick up their candy, she says.
That’s the kind of fun and creativity that makes Halloween a favorite holiday for the Mouls.
So, what do they do for Christmas?
“Lights. … Normal stuff,” Tracy says.
“For us, it is just Halloween.”
Reach Erin Andersen at 473-7217 or eandersen@journalstar.com.
This is not your ordinary Southeast Community College night class.
This is Halloween Prop Builders, and this gathering of
16 Nebraskans at Irving Recreation Center is ready to learn just how to make monsters, cadavers and creepy crawlers for their very own haunts.
Headmasters Brad and Tracy Moul (rhymes with howl) are longtime connoisseurs of everything Halloween.
“Halloween for us is 365,” Brad says.
He was born on Halloween.
He met his bride (of 10 months) while teaching his very first Halloween Props class — locking eyes over a plastic foam tombstone … well, maybe it wasn’t quite that romantic … but they did become fast friends with a mutual passion for ghouls, goblins and ghastly creatures of undead.
Tracy, who started haunting her family’s yard as a kid, remembers walking into Brad’s first class and discovering: “Oh my God, there are other people like me!”
Explains Brad: “We are Halloween fanatics.”
As are many of the students who take their class.
Ed Bales enrolled for one reason: to learn how to make his own tombstones.
He and his wife began decorating for Halloween back when he was stationed with the military in North Carolina. These days, their frontyard turns ghostly on Halloween night.
Jennifer Grosse, who took the Mouls’ class once before, said she’s b-a-a-a-ck for a tombstone refresher.
The Grosse family lives outside Lincoln’s city limits in the country. Their frontyard display is small and not so spooky, in deference to their 2-year-old.
“My family are funeral directors,” she said. “I grew up around tombstones.”
And like many of her fellow classmates, she opted to take the do-it-yourself path after falling financial victim to too many overpriced, mass-produced, poorly constructed props commonly found in spook shops and chain stores.
That’s how Brad Moul got his start 10 years ago.
“I always enjoyed decorating. But I would look at the mass-produced stuff and found it was cheaply made and not every realistic, and everybody else on the block has the same thing you have,” he said.
So he did what any fiscally responsible fanatic would do. He got on the Web — the World Wide Web, that is.
He found plenty of sites offering how-tos and tips for making everything from graveyards to groaning ghosts and ominous ogres. He relied on his construction experience to modify and manipulate the creatures into one-of-a-kind masterpieces created from unrecognizable materials of chicken wire, PVC piping, acrylic, adhesive and rebar.
For two years they ran the haunted house on 16th Street. And as they traveled the country meeting other happy haunters, they discovered a hidden world of “wish-we-could-do-that” humanoids, which inspired a new Halloween Props class that goes beyond just tombstones to actual 6-foot-long rotting corpses and maniacal creatures created out of a mysterious substance known as “monster mud.”
Teresa Crowder is modifying Moul’s format for a Monster Mud Grim Reaper to create a life-sized troll for the haunted garage and yard she and her husband, Kenny Crowder, conjure up every Halloween at 5330 Orchard St. She replaced the reaper’s skull with an old ogre mask filled with spray plastic foam and is giving him wart-ridden red ogre hands made of latex.
“I was going to use our styrofoam head,” she starts to say, “but we needed it for our antique barber chair …”
Crowder stops and grins … I’ve said enough …
The Crowders have but one goal on Halloween — “We just try to scare as many people as we can,” she said stifling an evil chuckle.
You’d be surprised at how many people flee from the yard and forget to pick up their candy, she says.
That’s the kind of fun and creativity that makes Halloween a favorite holiday for the Mouls.
So, what do they do for Christmas?
“Lights. … Normal stuff,” Tracy says.
“For us, it is just Halloween.”
Reach Erin Andersen at 473-7217 or eandersen@journalstar.com.
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