Between our house and the neighbors in the driveway was a gigantic spider Rowland constructed, with help from Robin and Kerrie, from chicken-wire and tarp. The body was six feet in diameter and the head was over two feet in diameter, with black-light bulbs in small lamps for eyes and PVC pipe cut into fangs. It was suspended from wires about four feet off the ground and the legs stretched to, and hung from, the awnings of both houses, with red wooden claws at the ends. It was up for two weeks before Halloween, and the neigborhood kids loved it.
However, the spider was only the beginning. This
year we wanted to maintain better control over who was at the party, since most of the problems
we've had in the past were not with friends, but friends of friends. So, to control how they
came in, we wanted to block off the driveway so they had to come through the front door.
At the end of the driveway, we put up the gate and suspended tarp between the two houses, and at the front of it Rowland put up an archway that Kerrie covered in dead vines and a couple small spiders. Then Rowland and Peter criss-crossed webbing from the arch to the gate, from the roof of both houses, and from the spider itself, to completely enclose the whole area. Robin helped suspend a skeleton in the middle of it, and a strobe light overhead lit the whole thing. This was all done just a day before the party, and the web was so thick it all but obscured the giant spider in the dark, so we reused it in 2001.
| The House | The Web |
| The Stage | The Courtyard |
| The Stake | The Dungeon |
| The Graveyard | The Gameroom |