Abbeville’s Spooktacular Halloween: An Eerie Extravaganza
ABBEVILLE — What would Halloween be like without a good scare? Chris Busby doesn’t want to know and he’s ensuring no one else does either.
His house on the 300 block of Magazine Street blends in with all the others. But as October rolls around, the front yard starts to transform. One by one, spooky displays go up. As the weeks progress, witches, ghosts, skeletons, creepy lights, and other frightening figures are added until Halloween night when the yard is bathed in fog from dry ice containers and chilling music and voices whisper across the yard. Decorating has begun.
By mid-September, his yard already featured two skeletons flanking a political sign. Occasionally, moans and eerie comments from hidden speakers break the silence. Boxes of Halloween decorations lay strewn on the front porch. Inside the house, a room is filled with various materials that Chris will use as building blocks for decorations, and a storage shed in the backyard is half full of eerie props.
Chris Busby isn’t one for half measures. His dad used to play Santa Claus when he was a child. “I remember my dad, him and my aunt, sitting out in the yard when I was 5 or 6 years old. They would have teddy bears and dolls and give them to kids. That’s how it all developed,” he fondly recalls.
Busby noticed that few people were giving out candy during Halloween, and he didn’t see much decorating while traveling in his job as a mail carrier. This spurred him and his neighbor, Sherri Foster, to go all out for Halloween a few years back. What started with about 250 kids visiting their yards in 2019 has ballooned to as many as 900 kids on a single night, he says, maybe even 1,000.
To put it in perspective, the city of Abbeville has about 5,000 residents. So, the crowds represent about 20% of the city’s population, although Chris stresses that a lot of out-of-towners visit. He decorated his property when he lived in Anderson, and he knows many people from there and Greenwood drop by.
The road gets so packed that people can’t even walk on the sidewalks on either side, Chris mentions. Last year, the show started around 4 p.m. and lasted until 11:30 p.m., with traffic stretching from Main Street to one block down to Marshall Avenue. “I just remember Halloween would last until 11 or 12 at night and everyone’s house would be lit up. I think it’s an opportunity to get together and see kids enjoy a night you would normally not see for much of the year,” he says.
Chris estimates that the decorations have grown by 200 to 300 percent over the years. “Every year, both of us, we’re adding more and more. Maybe two or three things a year, but over five or six years, it adds up.” The additions include animatronics, fog machines, black lights, strobe lights, with the latest being a projector to feature 3-D characters.
Chris’s favorite decoration is a girl in a black gown that rises into the air. Some decorations he buys, while others he builds himself, such as a pumpkin head that vomits fluids. He shows off a doll of a small child that he plans to put on a swing. The headless horseman might be the hardest decoration to get right, he says. By the time he’s finished, visitors won’t even be able to see his front yard.
Then there’s the candy
Each child gets one piece, Chris mentions. In the first year, he bought 350 pieces and had a surplus, which was disappointing. The next year, demand increased. Last year, he bought 830 pieces of candy, someone donated another 150 pieces, and he still had to buy more to meet the demand. Some people have already donated candies this year, even though Chris doesn’t solicit donations.
Despite the scares, fun is the ultimate goal. Chris recalls a parent allowing people dressed as scary characters to get into a car with a child who would not get out. Another year, they switched off strobe lights for a woman worried they might cause a seizure, so she could enjoy the show. “We don’t try to scare kids. We want to give them the Halloween experience, but not to the point they wouldn’t enjoy it again,” he says.
Getting the right atmosphere
One of the few challenges Chris has encountered is finding enough scary music to play from Alexas scattered throughout the yard. He takes tunes from movies and alters them by slowing the tempos and deepening voices so they sound more frightening. “If you take the music from the boat scene from ‘Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’ and slow it down, it actually sounds horrifying,” he points out.
Decorations will be up for most of the month, but Halloween night is when the show really starts. Chris encourages families to drop by. “It’s not really Halloween unless you can get scared,” he says.
For anyone looking to experience a memorable Halloween, Chris Busby’s yard is the place to be. Scary characters, eerie decorations, and an abundance of candy await!
