After 10 years, Raleigh’s over-the-top King of Halloween just gets better and better

Three days before Halloween, Jesse Jones is primping his monster collection like a garden full of dead petunias, making sure their guts glisten and their eyeballs bleed properly.

He positions the clown with a meat cleaver so it spills out of a trash can. He dangles the headless Iron Man from a tree branch on East Street. He props the mad scientist over a full-sized coffin on Oakwood Avenue so the whole street can see the rib cage showing through its lab coat.

In all, Jones musters an army of 50 full-sized creatures from a 40-foot storage trailer he keeps at his law office: a black-eyed jester waving a machete, a white-faced child in a blood-soaked raincoat, a dozen latex foam zombies with tufts of hair Jones applies personally.

By Monday night, several thousand gawkers will have crowded at his door, expecting fresh thrills.

“It’s a lot of pressure,” he admits.

But after 10 years, as Raleigh’s undisputed King of Halloween, Jones owns the joy of stoking an entire city’s dark imagination.

Mid-life compensation

For this defense attorney and former N.C. State University football player, the annual obsession is perhaps mid-life compensation for a childhood without much in the way of Halloween fun — no decorations or costumes.

A thousand people can tramp across his yard, a dozen news outlets can flash his face on TV, and Jones’ fervor only intensifies. He looks around Oakwood, sees the skeletons on nearly every porch, hears the werewolf howls from a trio of rival houses on nearby Elm Street, and he grins at the devilish switch he flicked.

“The thing about Halloween,” he says, “is it doesn’t matter who you are, your race, your religion. It’s letting you escape reality.”

Before the pandemic, trick-or-treaters arrived at his Oakwood house in busloads from other neighborhoods. The horde grew so large police would sometimes block off the street. Jones would recruit kids in clown costumes to run up and down the block banging trash can lids, and on some special nights, he hired a deejay to spin records on the front porch.

Even now — though he’s undecided over handing out candy — Jones spent so many hours in the dirt-floor basement assembling his display that he developed a cold and went hoarse.

His wife finally set boundaries:

1. No more monsters on the roof, where Jones’ demons made a hole.

2. No more monsters on the porch, where he drilled holes that collected water and termites.

3. No decorating before Oct. 1.

“She got so many rules,” he tells a passing admirer.

He shows off the headstone where he’s jokingly applied her photograph, and the mound of dirt beneath it with fingers rising angrily from the grave. “She’s flipping me the bird,” he says.

Where zombies come from

As a Halloween dabbler, I asked in frustration where Jones obtains his fabulous props — certainly not at Home Depot, where a $50 oversized skull was the best option on the shelf.

But it turns out his cousin left Campbell University, not being academically minded at the time, and landed in Wilmington cleaning up film sets. From there, Jones’ relative worked his way to executive producer on “The Walking Dead.”

This, it turns out, led to Jones’ connection with Creepy Collection, which used to make “Walking Dead” cadavers and now, along with supplying haunted houses nationwide, supplies Jones with zombies.

But outside the 40-foot storage trailer, a few of Jones’ pieces remain in the yard all year — often sporting a political slogan.

The 13-foot skeleton stood sentry outside his house at the height of the pandemic, sporting a sign that read, “Not vaccinated. See you soon, idiots!”

His towering green dinosaur has been known to chew on a doll that looked suspiciously like President Trump.

Not long ago, a team of paleontologists and assorted experts from the NC Museum of Natural Sciences trooped the few blocks to his house and inspected the dinosaur in detail.

“They said it’s a raptor,” he explains, pleased with the designation. “It’s a little large, but it’s a Mongolian raptor, and it’s not green. It should be bright colors.”

Any Halloween King worth his Junior Mints knows a scary display has to grow and evolve, offering new chills every year to keep eyeballs engaged. And with that in mind, Jones offers a full ensemble of “Stranger Things” victims with their legs bent backward at the knees, one of them floating above the street.

For a month, his house represents the ninth circle of Halloween decorating — an achievement so over-the-top that Raleigh’s real ghosts keep well clear, moaning in jealousy, checking their bloody rags in the mirror and asking each other, “Does this make me look scary?”