NYC’s Scariest and Most Awesome Halloween Houses – From Brooklyn to the Upper East Side

Looking for some thrills and chills this spooky season? Take a walk! These mansions boast some of NYC’s most imaginative and terrifying Halloween decorations, from gruesome animatronic shows to glowing flying saucers. Take a look – if you dare.

Terror in motion

43 St. James, Clinton Hill

The Spruills can’t remember when they started tricking their brownstone for Halloween. Wednesday — a 58-year-old retired English teacher who now runs an after-school program — thinks it was about the COVID pandemic. Her husband, Mike, 54, insists it was before.

But they agree on the item that started it all: a talking tombstone from Target.

“I came home and said, ‘You’ve got to put this on!’ said Wednesday to The Post.

Mike, a music teacher, was skeptical. But he humored his wife.

“I started adding things… this zombie guy, and then some spiders, some rats,” he said. “And then I started to lose my mind.”

Their decorations now include an animatronic vampire mauling innocent bystanders, a trembling demon with long hair and no eyes, a glow-in-the-dark tarantula with a pumpkin body, neon signs and a variety of painted skulls and skeletons . Some hold flowers between their teeth.

“We have a huge basement,” Mike said of storing them all.

He spends anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a year on their exhibit, and he starts looking for new additions as early as February.

This year alone, it has added three new features: a 10-foot-tall grim reaper, an equally large talking witch on a broom and a creepy marionette singing on a swing.

“He’s my new boyfriend,” she joked of the latter on Wednesday. “Bobby Strings!â€

Foreign invasion

106 Gates Ave., Clinton Hill

Linda Grafakos may not have the most extravagant Halloween display in town, but she definitely has the most imagination.

“The theme is that ET is about having a party and Men in Black is about security,” the 67-year-old retiree told The Post. “I like ‘ET,’ I like ‘Men in Black,’ so I put the two together.”

At her bow, five figures in ET masks, two aliens and an astronaut sit among an autumnal array of pumpkins, cornstalks and foliage. At the top, two life-size mannequins wearing oversized suits and sunglasses survey the scene.

Grafakos has spent the past 10 years dreaming up whimsical Halloween scenes for her home inspired by films such as Jurassic Park, Black Panther and Pirates of the Caribbean. She builds most of her own shows. and has a strict budget: about $100.

“My family thinks I’m crazy,” she said, except for her “amazing nephew” who sits with her while she does her crafts. “He is not afraid of them at all.”

Childhood dreams – and nightmares

158 Marlborough Rd., Prospect Park South

As a child, Donna DiDonato wished her parents would put up more Halloween decorations. Now, she’s an adult, with a house of her own in Prospect Park South. She has a big porch and she can put up as many decorations as she wants.

“I’m counting about 30,” she said. “And I add more every year.â€

DiDonato – who works in sales and marketing and is in her 50s – started her collection of ghosts and skeletons about 10 years ago when she found a haunted Victorian lady in a diaphanous dress and glowing red eyes .

“I felt like women were underrepresented in Halloween decor,” she said. So she “searched high and low” for others and finally found a quartet of fiery-eyed Miss Havishams to hang from her porch. It also has a variety of grim reapers, ghosts, skeleton dogs, a tree monster, and a 10-foot talking corpse.

“I added a two-headed dog this year that barks and unfortunately scares the dogs when they walk by,” she said. The decorations extend to the interior of her home, which she fills with trick mirrors from eBay and fake crows.

“I love aesthetics, I love interior design,” she said. “But the basic thing is the community. I talk to people I wouldn’t normally talk to. They stopped in front of your house. You smile, engage in conversation. It’s just unique.â€

Out of this world

123 East 61st St., Upper East Side

Amid autumnal decor on the Upper East Side, a 61st Street townhouse has a purple inflatable flying saucer, skeletons in spacesuits and a light-up display worthy of Dyker Heights at Christmas.

“I wanted to do something different,” said Michael, an investor who preferred not to give his last name. “We have 200 to 300 people stopping to take pictures outside our house a day,” he added.

Michael started shopping for various space accessories online in mid-September and spent more than $1,000 on decorations.

Hey, his wife, his 7-year-old son and the staff at their home put it all together in just “two hours” while listening to the Ghostbusters theme song.

“New York City is such a fast-paced city,” he said. “It’s nice to give people a reason to stop and smile.”

Bored stem

161 East 82 St.

“Upper East Died” reads a sign in front of 161 East 82nd Street: one of the neighborhood’s spookiest and most magical houses on Halloween.

For the past eight years its residents – a couple in their 50s who wished to remain anonymous – have draped a cornucopia of cornstalks, pumpkins, gourds, tombstones, severed hands, skulls and nets. Grim reapers with hoods hang from the windows and chained spirits adorn the front gate of the property.

This year, they’ve added a new figure: a seven-foot-tall pumpkin man with a demonic lantern head purchased at Costco. “It moves too, but the sensor is too far away,” the man told The Post. “But maybe on Halloween we’ll move it down here [so it will work].â€

All Dolled Up

353 President St., Carroll Gardens

Lucas Santiago doesn’t usually play with dolls. But the 22-year-old PA for ABC News has a collection of Barbies, old-fashioned dolls and Victorian-style figurines that he arranges outside his family’s Carroll Gardens home every Halloween.

“We have about 20 dolls,” Santiago said. “We found most of them online, but walking around Brooklyn, people always leave things they don’t want to donate, so I got some of the baby dolls that way.”

Santiago dresses the dolls in “creepy” white dresses, which he buys from Amazon, and arranges them in a vertical line, as if they are parading outside the house. This year, they carry a figure wrapped in a black body bag.

“Everybody’s afraid of dolls,” said a surprisingly cheerful Santiago. “And having them in a line like that makes them more terrifying.”