Lawhorn’s Lawrence: Front yard hearses and the spirit of Halloween

Mike Deines, along with his wife, Wendy, has created a haunted yard experience at their home in Eudora.

A Halloween mystery

Lawrence resident Graham Bailey is beginning to think he has a haunted yard of a different type.

Bailey and his wife built their Lawrence home at 2704 Westdale Circle in 1987. It has long been blessed with a large, wooded backyard that has created more than its share of adventures and questions for neighborhood kids.

Now, it appears it has created a new Halloween question: “Who is Leo Morgenstern, and what is he doing in my backyard?” Bailey asks.

Well, maybe Morgenstern isn’t actually in Bailey’s backyard, but his tombstone sure is.

Bailey said the grandchildren of some friends recently were playing in the backyard, when one of them asked Bailey why there was a tombstone in his yard. He looked and, sure enough: Leo Morgenstern, 1892-1938. It is a large, heavy, granite tombstone.

Bailey did a little looking on the Internet and found a Leo Morgenstern with the same birth and death dates in a cemetery in Hoisington. He made a few calls to Morgensterns in the central Kansas town and confirmed there is a Leo Morgenstern buried in that cemetery. No one knows much about Leo, other than he died in a car accident. His grave still has a tombstone, one that is shared with his wife. Why this tombstone was ever made and how it ended up in Bailey’s yard is a mystery.

Bailey would like to know some answers, though. If you know about the tombstone or Morgenstern’s history, e-mail Bailey at grahambailey@sunflower.com.

Absent definitive answers, though, Bailey has a theory. His kids and their neighborhood friends, now all grown adults, swore there was a man who lived in the woods. For whatever reason, they named him Eggman.

“My kids are convinced it is the work of Eggman,” Bailey says. “Maybe.”

Happy Halloween.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the reason behind the haunting in Mike Deines’ yard is tied to a mother-in-law.

Wait a minute. Let me rephrase that as I hear the ice beneath my married feet begin to crack. I’ll try again: A mother-in-law is responsible for the Grim Reaper in Deines’ lawn.

That doesn’t sound any better, does it? All right, one more time: Deines’ lawn produces Halloween joy and long-lasting memories for hundreds, and he has his mother-in-law to thank.

I knew I would finally get it right, but now you may be confused. Eudora resident Mike Deines has a haunted yard, and from where he sits that is a good thing. Deines fills his front yard with skeletons, Grim Reapers, Headless Horsemen, ghosts, goblins, witches, demonic pumpkins and, of course, a homemade hearse. But perhaps the strangest thing is that he and his wife, Wendy, invite people to walk through their yard to see it all. For about two weeks before Halloween, minivans and sedans will pull onto the couple’s Eudora cul-de-sac, and kids and adults alike will start traipsing through the yard. They wear a path around the shade tree, they stop to marvel at the detail of the skeletons, they wonder how the fog comes out of the nose of the Headless Horseman. (Well, out of the nose of the horse. The Horseman doesn’t have a nose, which is a bit of a sore subject with him.)

Perhaps you think all of this Halloween madness got started because of Deines’ address: 61 Savage Terrace. It is a convenient address for a haunting, but Deines said the genesis of his haunted yard goes back to his mother-in-law’s yard in Nebraska.

“She’s the crazy Christmas lady on her block,” Deines says “I go up there every Thanksgiving and spend days on end on the roof, in the yard, in the garage. It is Chevy Chase crazy up there.”

After one such trip, Deines realized something: He liked it. Decorating the yard was fun. He and Wendy thought it might be fun to go hog-wild and really decorate their house for Christmas too. Then, Deines had a chilling thought.

“I didn’t want to compete with my mother-in-law,” he says.

Yeah, that’s one you can’t win.

But Halloween seemed like it would be fair game. The couple have been decorating for 10 years now, although the first decorations were some yard bags stuffed with leaves and made to look like a spider.

Now, there is a hearse in the front yard.

It is one of those 1800s style horse-drawn hearses. Deines, a financial analyst, built it in his garage over the course of many weekends after studying several photographs of old hearses.

“I found there are not really a lot of blueprints for horse-drawn hearses,” he says.

The hearse, which includes an animatronic ghost as a passenger, is a pretty big attraction. But there are others. The Headless Horseman is 9 feet tall and is made out of 12-gauge wire and PVC pipe. It includes one of the four fog machines that Deines has in the yard. (His yard alone also has three circuit breakers, for all you electricians who were wondering.) Deines also certainly buys attractions too. This past year, he bought four animatronic devices, including another Headless Horseman, because you can never really have too many of those.

“I also have a new Crypt Lady. She is ashen gray and just under 6 feet tall,” Deines says like he is writing a bio for match.com. “Here lips move and she talks. She’s pretty cool.”

You can find all sorts of things in this yard. Deines says when you count all the “chatzkies” — you know, skull heads, bones, scythes and other such baubles — there are well over a hundred different pieces in the yard. (One of the skeletons is actually from a medical supply company.)

But there is something else you will find in this yard that is surprising: the spirit of Halloween. You hear about the spirit of Christmas, or even of Thanksgiving, but not the spirit of Halloween. Halloween is a holiday for spirits, not one that really evokes a spirit.

Yet, there is one in this yard. The spirit of Halloween is welcoming, it seems. Mike and Wendy invite people to just walk around their yard unsupervised. They wear a dirt path and trample the vegetation in a way that causes gardeners everywhere to suck their green thumbs in distress. And it is all free. There’s not a donation jar anywhere, even though Deines concedes it does cost several hundred dollars a year to set up the yard.

“This is just something we love doing,” Deines says. “We’ve never even considered a charge or anything like that. We might set it up to collect canned food for a food pantry, but the idea of money and all that starts getting weird.”

And despite what a hearse in the front yard may suggest, Deines isn’t trying to be weird with this haunted yard. It started out as just something fun to do — and that is still a big part of it — but Deines also has come to discover that Halloween is about more than just that. It is about letting people change who they are, if even for just a brief time. Maybe that is why Halloween has become so popular. (The National Retail Federation estimates Americans will spend $7.4 billion on Halloween this year, including $350 million on costumes for their pets.) And why not? Getting a chance to change who you are can be pretty rare.

“If you are walking down the street in a costume on July 5, people are going to wonder who is missing their idiot,” Deines says.

So, find your way to 61 Savage Terrace. Look for the hearse in the front yard. Deines says the Halloween spirit will be on site for years to come.

“We’re going to keep doing this,” he says. “There is no question about it. How we’re going to get much bigger, I’m not sure. But we’re having some discussions about the backyard.”

— Each Sunday, Lawhorn’s Lawrence focuses on the people, places or past of Lawrence and the surrounding area. If you have a story idea, send it to Chad at clawhorn@ljworld.com.