Juneau's spookiest house?

Brad, Carol, Kate and Lyman Austin live at quite possibly the spookiest address in Juneau.

• Photos

Their modest house lies down a winding, secluded driveway at 8001 Gladstone, where 11 tombstones poke jaggedly from the moss and elaborately costumed, life-sized spooks creep through the foggy woods.

Unfortunately, it's the home's secluded location close to the end of Mendenhall Loop Road, not the scary movie-set cemetery in the yard, that discourages trick-or-treaters. Last year, the first year Brad Austin rigged up the gory scene, only a few friends came by.

"I had like 20 pounds of candy to eat myself," he said.

Brad and Carol Austin say their yard is too creepy not to share. This year they're inviting any and all Juneau trick-or-treaters to drop by, if they dare.

Brad is a plumber with Cameron Plumbing and Carol is homemaker. Together, they are masters of Halloween kitsch. Walk in their house, and a visitor finds himself in a tunnel of doom, complete with plastic vampire bats, gauzy webs, plastic skulls, and a screaming, glow-in-the-dark goblin head.

"I love Halloween, I just like the whole idea of it. It is so fun for the kids," said Carol Austin, standing in candy-corn socks under the glow of a string of pumpkin lights. "It is not like Christmas where they have a meltdown over presents."

Carol says she generally tries to keep a balance in her decoration choices between "cutesy smiling ghost and slasher movie." A monstrous spider seethes above their refrigerator while a plate of eyeballs oozes on their kitchen table. Shrunken heads, like demented Christmas ornaments, dangle from a small tree above their TV. Carol made the heads out of dried apples studded with fake jewel eyes.

"They were really easy," she said, with the kind of pride Martha Stewart might have after baking a perfect batch of lace cookies.

Brad Austin expresses his Halloween talents in the family's front yard. This is his second year carving tombstones out of insulation foam and building life-sized corpse forms out of scrap pipe. In the yard, decomposing hands reach from the earth and "Sarah Marklin Harris," a rotting 1970s businesswoman, emerges from her tomb. Another ghoul holds a disembodied arm complete with a wedding ring and manicure.

"That used to be just hanging out of our (barbecue) grill," Carol Austin said of the severed arm.

The cemetery idea struck Brad last year, born out of a ghost story he told his children Kate, 11 and Lyman, 9, when the family was camping on Coghlan Island. One night by the campfire he made up a tale about the ghost of a miner named Jack Coghlan who died in a mine shaft cave-in. That Halloween he constructed his first tombstone, a Victorian-looking monument marking the miner's grave. After that the yard became his hobby.

"It was fun to build," said Brad, the more reserved half of the Austin couple, as he surveyed the yard on a recent lunch break wearing a Carhartt jacket with his name embroidered on the breast. "Helped to release a little tension."

Julia O'Malley can be reached at jomalley@juneauempire.com.