Ronan has a bone or two to pick with you

Currently putting the finishing touches to his annual Hallowe’en display at his home at Grovemount Park, Drumahoe, his imagination is taxed to the limit as he devises a gadget that will support a diaphanous ghost flitting back and forth across the front garden.

This year he has already added a headless horseman to his ghastly garden of exhibits, and was nearly giddy with excitement on Friday when he discovered that the postman had finally delivered the tins of red fluorescent paint spray he had ordered to embelish his blood-soaked body parts on the lawn. Well, there’s no point only having them visible during the day...

“The wife, Michelle, works in Tesco and after Hallowe’en one year they were selling off the stock and she arrived home with all this stuff, and that’s how it started off I built two coffins and with the coffins came the graveyard and it has just escalated,” said Ronan, who was sorting pikes for a row of heads that are lined up for completion in the utility room.

Naturally his handiwork is like a magnet for young and old alike, and on any evening in or around Hallowe’en you can expect to find scores of adults and children standing zombie-like in the family’s front driveway ogling the ghoulish exhibits while motorists perform slow drive-bys, their occupants straining their necks trying to get a better butchers at the fluorescent gore strewn across the front lawn.

“People started hearing about it and started calling round so I felt I had to do a wee bit more and I bought a few things and make things myself,” he said, admitting that things have now got to the stage where people come to him with all manner of ‘things’ he might find useful, like wigs.

At the weekend the Drumm house was strewn with the trappings of a Hallowe’en hoedown: In the hall there was a disembowelled smoke machine, flourescent lights and a production row of dismembered heads waiting for a bloodthirsty paint job, while a bag of bones sat on the kitchen table half buried in glittering ceiling mobiles and paper chains and banners.

“It takes about 25 hours to install what I have,” he says, adding: “I will be leaving it all in place until the weekend for those who want to come and see it and then it is all getting put back in the coffins until next year.”

There are a few surprises planned that should catch people unawares, so if you want a ‘spooktacular’ Hallowe’en visit the Drumm house - but don’t forget to take your mummie with you...