By JERREY ROBERTS
Staff Photographer
Daily Hampshire Gazette
SOUTHAMPTON — If you’re driving along College Highway in Southampton and see floating skulls or a skeleton swinging on a rope, it’s not your imagination — it’s the Halloween decorating vision of Jim Walunas.
Skulls and skeletons dominate the landscape outside the family’s home at 298 College Highway, but witches, ghosts, scarecrows and pumpkins round out the display. The family adds five to 10 decorations each year.
“We don’t like anything gory. We like folk art,” Walunas said. Walunas and his wife, Tammy, once lived on nearby Hillside Meadows Drive, where Halloween was celebrated enthusiastically by their neighbors.
“Hundreds of children would come. We ran out of candy,” said Tammy Walunas.
Over the years, celebrating Halloween became a neighborhood event for them — and each year, they added new props and elements to their display.
In 2008, they moved to their current home on College Highway. Their new home’s location — with few close neighbors, busy road and absence of sidewalks — isn’t a likely choice for trick-or-treating. So, instead, they host a party, and the rest of the family — including Bailly, 17, Becca, 14, and Tobey, 11 — joins in the decorating effort.
This year, they are inviting 40 families.
“It’s always just before Halloween, so you don’t lose the spirit,” Jim Walunas said of the party.
This year’s show-stopper is one skeleton using a plunger to deal with another skeleton stuck in a toilet bowl. Jim Walunas, who works as a plumber, explained the scene.
“He’s trying to get him out, or flush him through,” he said. “The plumber is our hero, we all know that.”
