A frightful yard sale

Published 10:14 pm Saturday, July 26, 2014

North Suffolk’s Ken and Karen Campbell create the appropriate atmosphere during their “Halloween in July” garage sale Saturday. It was time to find new homes for their scores of spooky decorations, a homemade coffin and eight mannequins among them.

North Suffolk’s Ken and Karen Campbell create the appropriate atmosphere during their “Halloween in July” garage sale Saturday. It was time to find new homes for their scores of spooky decorations, a homemade coffin and eight mannequins among them.

Halloween came early to one North Suffolk home Saturday.

After collecting spooky decorations for about 15 years, with their kids grown up and themselves not getting any younger, Ken and Karen Campbell decided to hold a frightening garage sale.

“Every year we just added to the collection,” said Karen Campbell.

Email newsletter signup

The props surrounding her included dozens of fiendish heads, eight horrible mannequins, battery-operated chattering skeletons, Jason from the “Friday The 13th,” evil babies, an electric chair, miniature gallows with an unfortunate corpse, and — perhaps the piece de resistance — a coffin Ken Campbell made from ¾-inch plywood.

That’s just a brief inventory.

Dozens of fiendish heads were featured at Ken and Karen Campbell's "Halloween in July" garage sale.

Dozens of fiendish heads were featured at Ken and Karen Campbell’s “Halloween in July” garage sale.

The Campbells started collecting in Virginia Beach, continuing when they moved to Suffolk’s Bridgewater Court in 2006.

“It started small, with just my husband dressing up,” confided Karen Campbell. “Then we got something for the yard, and it just grew from there.”

Through the years, the family has accrued quite a reputation. One Halloween, a neighbor asked her son to scare their kids for them, Karen Campbell said.

“It’s a little sad, because this Halloween is going to be very, very different for us,” she said. “We are not going to be putting stuff out in the yard. The kids are going to be disappointed when they come around the corner and don’t see stuff.”

Another factor in the decision to shed the gear is the effort required of Ken Campbell to set it all up and put it all away again.

“I’m getting a little bit older,” he said. “We have had fun. We did it mainly to scare the kids in a friendly manner.”

The Campbells will have fond memories of dressing up and standing out on their front lawn with their freak-show mannequins to scare the living daylights out of innocent people.

They would remain perfectly still, Ken Campbell said, and then erupt into motion to show that not every mannequin was plastic, immobile and harmless.

“The coffin was probably the biggest thing,” he reminisced.

He would lie down inside with the lid shut. Peering through a crack, when he saw a curious neighborhood kid creep up for a closer inspection, he’d rise up from the dead.

“If you need a playpen, we got a playpen,” Ken Campbell said to a pregnant prospective customer, indeed pointing to a playpen, spray-painted black.

“We had our granddaughter and the zombie babies in there.”