There's one in every neighborhood: the couple that goes all out at Halloween to give trick-or-treaters the kind of spooky thrills they can recall years later.
In the 500 block of West 10th Street, that couple is Dan and Kathy Balchunas.
For 15 years the Balchunases created Halloween tableaus that cause kids' eyes to go wide, passers-by to gawk and TV shows like HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" to feature the house as a backdrop.
The tradition started out small, with a black visqueen "wall" with cut-out "windows," behind which friends popped out to scare trick-or-treaters, Dan said.
Now the couple turn their neat home -- from front yard and facade to the entire first floor -- into a Halloween display with thousands of store-bought and homemade props.
The collection includes everything from spiders and rats to mummies, skeletons, witches and cadavers and several life-size animated figures.
There's a coffin and headstones. A headless "skeleton board" kids can pose behind for photos. And a bat with glowing red eyes donated by a local community theater after a production of "Dracula."
Dan sets off the display with a web-shrouded black "iron" fence and faux brick pillars, and lights it with skull tiki lights and fog machines.
"I do engineering, so it's got to have a realism to it," he said. "It can't be too fakey."
It takes the couple two weeks to put up the display, which changes from Halloween to Halloween.
The year Martha Stewart went to jail they created a barred cell complete with bathroom and floor strewn with newspapers and Martha Stewart Living magazines.
When Sept. 11 shook the nation in 2001, they scaled back and stuck American flags in the skeletons' hands.
This year's ghostly scenes include the Dead-End Cemetery and Uncle Dan's Pumpkin Patch, in which a pumpkin "farmer" grows and sells people, instead of the other way around. Gargoyles top the pillars, bones litter the cemetery and skeletons drag themselves over roof peaks.
Inside, a red-caped "Grandpa" welcomes visitors into a haunted parlor while an animated bartender presides over a haunted pub.
Other rooms feature a birdcage with owls and blackbirds and a "haunted house" dollhouse. Even the bathroom is eerily decorated.
The Balchunases welcome between 800 and 1,000 trick-or-treaters on Halloween, plus another 100 or so friends and family.
"It's like an open house," said Kathy, who serves warm cider and chili, cookies and fruit to those inside.
Even before it's complete the display attracts excited visitors like Kathy's Munson Kids Club and Nathan Meadows of Lake Ann, who recently stopped to snap photos.
"At night it's fun for us to sit in the living room and see all these cars streaming by with lightbulbs flashing," Kathy said.
When the holiday is over, the couple take another two weeks to dismantle the decorations, which they store in their two-story garage. Around August, Dan said, he starts to think about doing it all over again.
"Halloween is so simple," he said. "There's no gift-giving, you don't have to wear a suit and tie. You can just be a kid."
