For some families, Halloween ranks right up there with Christmas as the time of year to decorate the house and yard for the season.
Two Maysville families have been decorating their houses for Halloween for at least 20 years and are easily recognizable to most who treat-or-treat along East Second Street.
Stephen Gillispie's house is mostly known for the large inflatable decorations and the scenes from Halloween movies that are acted out on his roof by his daughter, Angie Merrill.
"This is mostly my wife and daughter's thing," Gillispie said. "They go all out for the holidays. We've been putting up decorations for the seven years we've lived here and about 28 years before that."
Merrill said she and her children love Halloween and always have fun with the decorations and scaring people.
"I was up on the roof last year and my husband was pretending to kill me," she said. "I was hanging down and people were stopping to take pictures and video. It was a lot of fun."
Merrill said she does the makeup for everyone who will be on the porch to scare people.
"I've already got a lot of the makeup picked out and I've been practicing. We try something a little different each year."
Gillispie and Merrill said they decorate for all of the major holidays and everyone should keep an eye out for their Christmas decorations.
Wanda and James Lester said they have decorated their home for about 15 to 20 years and each year they feature one decoration that stands out among the rest -- the wolfie.
"Wolfie is our center of the decorations," James Lester said. "The kids love him. Some take pictures with him when they stop by. We had to wait until late in the month to put him out this year, because we had problems with people stealing him."
James Lester said the decorations, which also include a "Do Not Enter" sign, graves and a slender man on the side of the house, are mostly handmade by them and their daughter and son-in-law.
"Most of our decorations are made," Wanda Lester said. "We always decorated and now our daughter has taken over what we can't do."
The Lesters said they began decorating their house each year because they had three children who loved Halloween. They continue to decorate because their granddaughter, and the trick-or-treaters love it.
"We decorate for the major holidays," James Lester said. "Like Halloween and Christmas."
Two families in Beechwood have come together to create one large decoration for Halloween this year.
Jamey Dudley and Ricky Elliott, two neighbors in Beechwood, decided that instead of having a lot of little decorations, they would come together and create a large, tree-sized slender man.
"We just wanted to have a decoration that the kids will talk about," Dudley said.
The slender man figure, which took about two hours to create, is made from cardboard, trash bags, a grocery bag and a pair of shoes, according to Elliott.
Elliott said the figure stands about 10 feet tall and is taped to the tree.
"It's so he won't run away at night," he said. "He likes to visit the neighbors when he's not held down."
Elliott and Dudley said they will be making a special Christmas decoration for the neighborhood in December.
"It's been really popular, so we want to do something for Christmas, too," Dudley said.
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