Last year, in a city full of amazing, intense and over-the-top Halloween displays, we highlighted this Prospect Park South residence as the most impressive Halloween house in Brooklyn. This year, we're ready to go ahead and declare this possibly the most impressive Halloween house in the entire city.
Located at the corner of Albemarle and Argyle, this Halloween house stands out as the most decorated home in a neighborhood that is already proudly pro-Halloween decorations. There are skeletons climbing the turret; dead bodies and other creatures buried in the front yard; witches and jack o'lantern ghouls taking up all the room on the porch; creepy dolls and giant spider webs; and of course, ridiculous homemade clown paintings. When night comes, video projections of ghosts and spirits appear in the windows up above. And many of the other creatures come to animatronic life as well, with plenty of creepy noises to boot.
Owner David Lindsay-Abaire previously told us that he and his wife started decorating the house in 2013 as part of the PPS Halloween Parade. "So I got some string lights, a lot of webbing, and my first few animatronic monsters," he said of that first year. "Every year after that, I’d get a couple more zombies, or a new witch, and the collection would grow. Five years in, and the porch is so populated that I’ve had to expand to the upper floors."
The clown paintings come courtesy of a friend who is an actual clown, and his favorite part of the house are the skeletons climbing the walls: "I spend a lot of time crawling onto the roof of the porch, reaching on tiptoes or leaning out of windows."
It takes several weekends to put the entire thing together (and a little less time to take it all apart and put it back in the basement), but it's all worth it to hear the screams of delighted and terrified children: "I’m a writer, so during the day I’m usually at my desk on the third floor," he said. "There happen to be several pre-schools in the neighborhood, and almost every day one of them will walk a small group of kids over to look at the decorations. Which means that at least once a day, while I’m hunched over my keyboard, deep in thought, desperately trying to put sentences together, I’ll be startled back to reality by the ear-splitting shrieks of children on the front lawn. To me, that’s the best part. It makes me laugh every time."
