Dave and Aubrey are well-known artists in their community for making horror props and for this Halloween season, they took it to a whole new level turning their front yard into a scene out of the hit Netflix hit TV show Stranger Things.
The couple who live in Plainfield, Illinois attracted so much attention with their spooky front yard that neighbors called the authorities who forced Dave and Aubrey to it close down to visitors.
“Everyone seemed OK with it, until they weren’t,” Aubrey Appel, who created the display, told ABC.
The spooky scene shows a portal to another dimension, spiders crawling on the garage, and a life-like mannequin dressed as the character Max Mayfield who appears to be floating in mid-air.
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“It was just really cool,” visitor Kyle Mitchell told ABC. “We saw it on TikTok and we just thought it was so cool you couldn’t see any wires or anything.”
A video that Dave and Aubrey posted to their TikTok went viral getting more than 14 million views. The video along with several other videos had families showing up to figure out how the mannequin was floating and all the traffic ended up making the neighbors not fans of the decorations anymore.
@horrorprops♬ Stranger Things – Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein
Aubrey said she spoke with the neighbors before and as they were decorating their yard and at first they were ok with it. However, after too many people began to show up, the police were called and told them to shut everything down.
“It’s upsetting, you know, to be told, ‘we support you, we’re behind you, we understand why you’re doing this’… and then to have that blow up in our faces,” Aubrey told ABC.
The annoyed neighbors said that the popularity of the display has brought negative attention to the neighborhood, endangered the community’s children, and made the neighborhood a target of possible home invasions.
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When ABC reporters asked people around the neighborhood about the display everyone they spoke to had nothing but good things to say.
“It’s just all families coming out to see such an amazing setup,” one neighbor Trina Mahon said.
As of now, the Stranger Things Halloween display remains closed, however, Dave and Aubrey are speaking with the city officials to figure out what they can do to reopen the display.