Haklloween great, just don't scare the crap out of kids

Nightmare on Cooper Breaks Drive
An Humble family's enthusiasm for Halloween gets them in hot water with the neighbors


By MICHAEL D. CLARK
2006 Houston Chronicle

It's all Halloween fun until someone pulls the limbs off mannequins, hangs them from meat hooks on the porch next to the blood-spattered and hanged torsos to which they were once attached.

The line between holiday decorating and recreating a scene from a horror movie was at the center of a neighborhood debate over yard decor Jeff Furth and Susie Moorman's home in the Eagle Spring subdivision in Humble for the last week.

On Tuesday, the Eagle Springs Civic Association agreed with residents opposed to Furth and Moorman's gory installation. When Moorman got home from work, a certified letter with a fine for $150 was waiting on her doorstep along with instructions to take it down immediately. Failure to comply would result in fines of $200 per day.

Furth said the fines won't be necessary. Tuesday evening he moved his grim landscape of body parts, grave markers and coffins into his backyard.

"It's disappointing," he said. "This is the first time I've had to deal with the homeowner association and it was a nightmare."

Furth and Moorman say their front-yard gallery of gore was simply their way of getting into the Halloween spirit. At dusk each night they added to the spooky mood with a mix of tiki torches, red backlighting and smoke machines which lined the path to their front door with a hazy mist.

"We're like the Griswolds of Halloween," Furth said on Monday, referring to the overzealous Christmas decorating in the 1989 comedy National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

Added his fiancee Moorman, "We don't want to hurt anybody's children. This is about fun."

But across-the-street neighbor Dee Dee Omensen saw nothing funny about the front yard. She said her 5-year-old, Emma Joy, burst into tears the first time she saw the bloody motif and refused to walk by it to get to Eagle Springs Elementary School.

The Furth-Moorman home is located near the neighborhood's central mailbox and next to a walking path that takes children to the nearby grade school.

"That's not festive. That's a murder depiction," said Omensen, a mother of three who says she is now driving daughter Emma Joy to and from school on a different route. "It's too real and it's inappropriate."

Heather Schrade, a mother of two elementary school age boys, summed it up simply: "It's disgusting."

Not all the neighbors, including some with young children, agreed with Omenson and Schrade. Gathering in the driveway of the house next to Furth and Moorman's on Monday night, friends and supporters watched as their kids rode scooters by the yard and walked up to take a closer look.

"It would be one thing if the yard was filled with junk and broken down cars all the time, but everybody knows that Jeff and Susie are good people," said Lori Maugans. She added that her 3-year-old and 7-year-old aren't scared because they understand it's fake.

"Seeing their yard made me want to do something scary with mine," said another neighbor, Ken Kerr.

This is the second Halloween that Furth has set up his scary decorations since moving to Houston from Florida 18 months ago. Last year there were some complaints and the Eagles Spring Civic Association, CIA Services, contacted Furth about voluntarily scaling it down. He didn't.

This year the potential hit to Furth's wallet has given him little choice but to move it out of sight. "Hopefully we'll be able to set it up (in the backyard) in a way that still draws interest," said Furth.