Rummage through Linda Motta’s garage and you’ll find three blood-sucking bats and a pile of severed heads.
Plastic ones, that is.
It’s in this storage space – where neighbors might keep skis and tennis rackets, tools and coolers – that Motta began her small collection of Halloween decorations 20 years ago. Two decades and hundreds of dollars later, the ensemble now covers the entire front of her house and lawn.
The eerie house decorations are the talk of the town every October, especially among kids in search of a good scare.
“I’ve talked to the Halloween lady before,” a 10-year-old neighbor boy boasts, as he and his friends pull up on bikes to check out the house.
Older kids whiz over by skateboard and 3-year-olds toddle up, hand-in-hand with mom. By now, Motta is used to the continuous flux of youngsters who meander up and down her front steps hoping for a spook, even weeks before the 31st.
“I can see it makes them happy,” she says, remembering how much she looked forward to Halloween when she was young.
When night falls at the Motta residence, a strobe light begins to flash, the sound of thunder booms, ghouls cackle, an ominous-looking butler talks and a six-foot mummy’s eyes follow visitors to the door. Screams and squeals can be heard echoing throughout the quiet neighborhood, cries that are more out of joy and exhilaration than actual fear.
It’s a slightly strange phenomenon, Motta admits. The idea of wanting to be scared, seeking it out and taking pleasure in it, is one she doesn’t quite understand. But it’s all part of the Halloween spirit, she says.
“People like it for the same reason they go on scary rides,” she says. “Only this plays more into a kid’s imagination.”
Neighbor Lisa Lang, who was visiting the house with her three eager kids, said they sometimes stop by four times in one day. They come over in their pajamas before bed and after school in the autumn daylight. On her frequent trips to the house, she said she’s noticed that cars slow down when they drive by, to get a good look.
“I’ve met more neighbors that way, it really does bring people together,” Lang says.
Growing up in the Richmond district of San Francisco, just blocks from Golden Gate Park, Motta remembers the excitement of dressing up with her sister one night a year. Families in her neighborhood gave away candy, but it was the older Asian couple living next door who made trick or treating an idyllic childhood memory for her. She remembers sprinting up the stairs to their apartment every year in anticipation.
“They would always have something special, I mean really special, that they made for us,” she says.
These days, people are discouraged from passing out homemade goodies. When the New York Times printed an article in the early 1970s detailing several cases in which needles and razor blades were found in Halloween treats, everything changed.
While follow-ups in the 1980s concluded that virtually all of the scares turned out to be pranks by the children, according to “Razor Blade in the Apple: the Social Construction of Urban Legends,” the story still lives on in the minds of apprehensive parents.
But it’s people like Motta who remind suburban parents that, in reality, few people are “out to get” kids on Halloween. And that most actually prefer to spread joy. Still, she notes the importance of safety and, of course, the importance of good treats.
“I only get the good stuff,” she says with a grin. “Chocolate.”
Since candy is, to most kids, the equivalent of gold, she makes sure to stock up with six Costco-sized bags every year.
“I let them take handfuls,” she says.
Motta, who spends a total of about two weeks getting her decorations ready, has a tradition of setting them up Oct. 1 and taking them down the day after Halloween. She shops at Spirit Stores, Boswell’s, and has even hand made some of her decorations from old costumes.
As Danville’s unofficial “Halloween Lady,” she is the local authority on how trick or treating has changed over the years. Aside from the safety issues that have penetrated the media, she said she sees a lot more fathers out trick or treating with their kids. Forty – or even 15 – years ago, it was almost entirely mothers out with their young ones.
Even costumes have changed, growing exceedingly more intricate in the last 20 years. People spend much more time and money preparing their costumes than they did when she first began her creepy collection, she said. She recalls a day when only the affluent could afford packaged, full length costumes.
“I used to make my son’s tin man costume out of aluminum foil,” she says. “We’d put three boxes together. Now they are incredible.”
On the big night, groups of kids, parents and teenagers gather outside to chatter about their outfits, while flash photography lights up the streets. The house is used as a meeting point on Meese Circle, off San Ramon Valley Boulevard, and some fascinated kids even spend hours at a time there. A parade of costumes floods through her driveway and she welcomes everyone onto her front steps.
Come the morning of Nov. 1, though, the Halloween House is back to being just another house on the block. The decorations come down and are stowed back in the garage for another 11 months, until leaves begin to fall and baskets of candy are put out again.
“I look forward to it every October and when I take it down it feels … emptier,” Motta says.
Like her kind older neighbors in San Francisco all those years ago, she is creating Halloween nostalgia. It’s her turn now, she says.
