Ghouls and Ghosts Haunt Macomb Family's House Inside and Out

The gory looking monsters and dozens of hollow-faced skeletons in Ray Pfeiffer’s Macomb Township basement may be small in stature but the scare factor is still there.

A huge Halloween fan, Pfeiffer is up to his elbows year round designing a massive tabletop village of the damned.

Haunted Village

“He started this out in our storage room with one table but pretty soon it took over this whole part of our basement,” said Ray’s wife, Sue Pfeiffer. “He’s got trains, monsters from TV shows and movies like The Munsters and Creature from Black Lagoon and he’s made a lot of the things himself.”

Haunted mansions and sleek, dark buildings dot the village that lights up to show off Ray Pfeiffer’s impressive collection, including many items from Department 56. Amid the structures, a pair of trains race along tracks lined with scary figures. There’s also a huge array of neatly designed and meticulously painted Styrofoam shrubs, bushes and tree trunks' eyes crowding the landscape.

“I get ideas for things and then I just make them myself because the stuff can be very expensive,” Ray Pfeiffer said. “Like this large dragon over here, I made that and then I ordered real sharks teeth for it from eBay.”

Growing up in a household watching tons of monster movies and coming up with elaborate Halloween costumes led Pfeiffer to his hobby. 

“My dad was really into it and we were always working on things and getting dressed up in scary costumes," he said.

“Ray’s been doing this now here at our house for about 20 years, the costumes, decorations and of course, our yard,” Sue Pfeiffer said.

Haunted Lawn

In the weeks before Halloween, the couples' front yard starts to take on the look of a haunted cemetery complete with ghouls, coffins, fog machines and battery-operated flying bats.

Two decades of creating and collecting now means it’s just normal for the neighbors to hear screeching, moaning and see flashing lights coming from the Pfeiffers' house.

“I dress as the Grim Reaper and I do like to scare people but I watch who I scare, don’t want to upset the real little kids,” Ray Pfeiffer said.

Scaring his own daughter, Marisa, now 18, might have been unintentional, but planting the freakish clown from the movie “It” outside her bedroom window over the years has taken its toll.

“Marisa doesn’t like scary things at all," Sue Pfeiffer said. "I think the whole thing still freaks her out, but with the clown in her window all those years, can you blame her?” Meanwhile, the Pfeiffers’ sons Mike, 24, and Ryan, 21, can appreciate their father’s hobby but it’s really only the younger one that gets into the spirit of things.

“Ryan’s birthday is in early November, so all of his parties were always with a Halloween theme and out of the three, he likes to do this with Ray the most,” Sue Pfeiffer said.

Still, despite the massive displays of horror inside and outside of her home this time of year, Sue Pfeiffer maintains a much tamer approach to the dress-up holiday. Showing off their large costume collection, spookiness stays with her spouse, leaving her to be such beloved characters as The Cat in the Hat, Thing 1 and Thing 2 and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.