Kentlands’ Halloween (PHOTOS)
What is it about Kentland’s and Halloween? What makes this particular secular fall celebration such a destination in upper Montgomery County? For me it draws comparison to springtime in Kenwood with their cherry blossom lined streets. The answer to my questions lies somewhere between Kentlands (and it’s neighbor the Lakelands) being a walkable community and a welcoming homeowner environment for the show that’s Halloween. Part Mardi Gras and part Thanksgiving Day parade, but all festooned in black and orange.
The color orange fits this community especially at this time of year with its gracious tree lined streets and white picket fences. Big spiders and their synthetic spun webs are a dominant theme throughout. However, residents need to do a little more than spin spider webs to win the coveted Kentlands Community Association (KCA) Best Overall Award for thematic design. In matter of fact it took a Mustang convertible with four Beach Bum skeletons playing Beach Boy songs with a blow-up surf board, a skeleton climbing out of the street side sewer drain, eerie window ghost apparitions and breezy cloth ghostlets hanging from the porch among the many other home color effects on display only at night. One should note that no spiders were wrangled or harmed in their production.
The show is really the homeowners. On this past all-saints-eve night they are the ones having the most fun of those who choose to participate. The owners spend October nights and weekends sorting out and trying props while locating special sources for the new and unusual spook-spectacular display. Their teenage children are a good source of knowledge as to what will work the best.
Past theme displays attract repeat visitors. Such as the two-story gorilla that leads to a back-alley cul-de-sac parking area where children of all ages get to walk through the blowup gorilla legs for a treat. Or the ghost home, where the owner invites tricksters to walk past “the bar at the end of the world” (sorry Kenny Chesney, it’s here in the Kentlands) or sit in the “portrait parlor” for a quick family photo with local skeleton ghosts and their host.
Wicked witches sit on stoops, so do cat women, old men in pajamas all holding tubs filled with candy or healthy treats. Colored lights of all varieties streak across porches. Smoke machines filter the sidewalk lights while Thriller music thumps from their living rooms. Even Winter Coming scenes from Game of Thrones demand attention.
On this night because the weather has cooperated you’ll even find the neighborhood wives chatting on their friends’ steps while sipping adult beverages, all enjoying the costumed crowd entertainment that works their way up the steps. But really, they are just enjoying the last vestiges of fall with their friends.
You cannot flash photography this event. You need the amber cast down light of street lamps and shaky hand-held images to impart a sense of the manufactured macabre. The low lights and dark costumes, the street side quintet of high school musicians, the strange and stranger of all things gathered here for what is the sights that exist in the Kentlands neighborhood. All a witch’s brew where young children can feel safe and walk under the distant guidance that is part of today’s parental supervision.
For me the best moment of the night was a bizarre one.
I stopped by my friends Chris and Julie’s home and watched with Chris the parade of costumes while Julie handed out with a nun-like determination the remaining hundred pieces of treats. Music blared from Chris’ outdoor speakers when up his front street sidewalk comes a lone “grave digger” dressed in a dark coat shouldering a long shovel with a painted Calavera Catrina skull face holding a lighted six candle candelabra. All three of us gaped as “it” walked by looking only straight-ahead while Jim Morrison of The Doors was singing “People Are Strange (when you’re a Stranger)” from Chris’s music box.
Spooky.
So, a new season begins today as the Kentland’s Halloween stage scenery is dismantled and stored in attics and garages. For some homeowners, these boxes are placed away only to make way for the next scene, Christmas in the Kentlands, which makes those picket fence lights really look good with a covering of snow.
Snow, now that’s a scary thought.
Phil Fabrizio
All images copyrighted 2017 © Phil Fabrizio | Photoloaf
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