Sunday: Tulsa Police investigate 'haunted' house
BY JASON ASHLEY WRIGHT World Scene Write
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Vickie Rounsaville-Millard was watching the OU-Texas game last weekend when two police cars pulled up in front of her house.
When the officers started walking around her front yard, she was understandably alarmed — “scared,” actually, as she posted on Facebook.
She went outside to see what was going on — and they were taking pictures.
“We got a call about a dead body,” one of the officers said.
She laughed. Millard had quite a few of them, and people drive by all the time and take pictures with their phones.
“There’s another one,” she said not two minutes after we arrived at her house recently in the Briarwood subdivision at 31st Street and 89th East Avenue. She wasn’t referring to bodies but folks driving by taking pictures of bodies. Or the big spider. Or the vampire baby.
Or, her favorite, the crib of infant zombies.
Millard’s house stands out in her neighborhood — and, perhaps, Tulsa — as a tricked-out Halloween treat of ghoulish delights, from tombstones and spider webs to Hollywood horror characters and sound effects.
Another reason for her yard’s conspicuousness is that not as many people seem to be decorating like they used to.
“There are definitely those people out there who are the Griswolds of Halloween, who make their yard extravagant and spooky,” said Michael Kowalewski, a category manager for Westlake Hardware stores, during a recent phone interview from Kansas.
He was referring, of course, to the fictional family from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” in which Chevy Chase’s Clark Griswold dramatically decks his home with power-draining holiday lights.
Read more in Sunday's World.
Associated Images:
Taylor Millard, age 20, in the front yard of her family's home with their annual Halloween decorations in east Tulsa. MICHAEL WYKE/Tulsa World
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