‘I couldn’t stop’: Texas woman says $40K Halloween obsession has taken ‘life of its own’

Most people have hobbies.

Chris Caughlan has an obsession.

Every year now for nearly a decade, the 50-year-old Granbury woman has put on a Halloween show in her yard that would make Wes Craven proud.

She has hoarded hundreds of pieces of plastic, rubber and PVC pipes through the years to create her collection of creatures. She has toured yard sales for parts. She has gone to trade conventions to buy figures that would transform her 1-acre property near Lake Granbury into a haunted hobby house for the neighborhood to fear.

“Once I got started I couldn’t stop,” Caughlan told the Star-Telegram. “The more I did, the more I wanted to do.”

This is the seventh year for “Twisted Crazy Haunt” — a Halloween-themed event that Caughlan and her husband, Joe, 49, put together in front and around their home along a dip on Peachtree Street roughly five miles from the historic Hood County Courthouse. Donations are welcomed and all proceeds the past three years have gone to the Hood County Station 70 VFD, located up a country road from the Caughlans on Hill Top Road.

Folks like the Caughlans have helped make Texas No. 4 in the nation for states most obsessed with decorating for Halloween, according to a Lombardi Homes poll. On average, the poll concluded, households in the Lone Star State spend $145 on the decorations and more than three hours on decorating.

If money spent on decorations shows levels of obsession, Caughlan rates very high indeed. By her estimate, she has spent close to $40,000 in seven years — $13,000 in just the past two alone.

“If it gets any bigger we might have to have an intervention,” Joe said with a chuckle.

How a hobby turned into an obsession

Caughlan used to enjoy decorating for Christmas. She’d put up a tree just after Thanksgiving and labored to get her home festive for the holidays. Her four children loved that, she said. When her children flew the nest to start families of their own, Caughlan was restless. She needed something to do.

“I told her either she needed to volunteer or find a hobby, something to do,” Joe said. “Something she could, you know, feel accomplished with.”

Caughlan decided to parlay her love for horror flicks into creating the scariest Halloween characters she could. It came so easily to her. She went online to Pinterest and YouTube seeking inspiration.

“Everything’s in my head,” she said. “Usually I just start something with a general idea and it takes a life of its own”

She made most of the props when she first started seven years ago. She once found discarded cardboard that she turned into a coffin, lining it with black trash bags and keeping it all together with duct tape.

It was a hit.

“It lasted for two seasons,” she said proudly of her first homemade prop.

People in the neighborhood began dropping in to see what she was up to.

They’d ask: “How do you put all of this together?”

Her response? “You don’t want to be in my head.”

The hook was set.

“It just went from there,” she added.

What makes all the hard work worth it?

Last Friday, a little over a week before Halloween, Caughlan was running around her yard in a white tank top, in “whatever jeans that’d fit,” a pair of Skechers sneakers and a neon green bandana to keep hair out of her eyes. With a Pall Mall cigarette dangling precariously on thin lips, she scurried about checking batteries and power cords and switching on figures before the day died and guests arrived.

She is as nervous as she is stressed out.

Everything has to be just right with her, Joe said. It is a lot of work.

But the rewards are rich.

“(Friday) night, it wasn’t even completely ready and I had kids going through. Watching them, to hear them laughing, enjoying my hard work. Oh, it’s so worth it,” she said. “And then of course, you know, all the donations I get, I get to hand over to the firehouse so that makes it even better.”

Inflated pumpkins and witches are child’s play compared to the Caughlans Halloween offering. It takes at least half an hour to navigate the displays — from a demonic circus featuring nearly 20 clowns of all shapes and sizes to a pumpkin patch of horrors and a walk through a graveyard of dead pets.

There’s Pennywise, the clown from “It”, Beetlejuice and his skeletal wedding party and, of course, Leatherface, the human skin mask-wearing antagonist in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

As darkness descended over the scattered mountain cedar and live oaks on the Caughlans’ property, beams from flashlights crisscrossed the yard as visitors explored. Running down a pitch-black trail by the chain link fence, a young woman breathlessly cries out: “That one, that one, that scared me.”

Then laughter.

Work on Halloween goes on year-round

It’s not like this is Caughlan’s full-time job. She owns and operates Crazy Chris’s Cleaning company, a business that caters to builders who need new homes cleaned out before going on the market. It is lucrative as it is backbreaking work. After getting home from jobs, Caughlan beelines for the sheds to work on Halloween.

Caughlan starts organizing her props in June and July. Her husband argues she works on it year-round. There are stacks of large plastic bins (20-30 by Caughlan’s last count) in two sheds Joe built. More pieces are scattered around the yard. Each year the collection grows.

This year she proudly shows off a Halloween-themed arcade she built out of wood pallets and sheets of black plastic. There’s the “Skull Toss,” where kids can throw a plastic skull into a basket. A few feet to the right is the “Eye Toss,” a bastardized version of beer pong. Then there is the “Ring Toss,” a carnival game where players toss rings around skeletal hands and arms.

Caughlan’s creativity and labor does not go unnoticed: “My, daughter, and myself spent almost an hour checking out all the displays and I can’t say enough about how much thought and planning went into it. The hosts are awesome people for doing this,” Wayne Everett said. “There was an element of almost a hayride feel without the hayride.”

This “labor of love,” as Joe describes it, “Makes her happy. She does it for the enjoyment of the kids.”

Every time he reminds her to slow down, “I’m at the point now where I can’t push back on it at all because it gets thrown back in my face,” he said with a laugh.

“He messed up,” Caughlan said of her husband’s suggestion to find a hobby.