South Philadelphians do Halloween big — and beautiful

South Philadelphians do Halloween like they do everything else: big.

“Always, all my life!” said Michelle Blevins, 58, her Girard Estates front porch packed with a small army of swinging ghouls, graveyard ghosts, and coffined skeletons, while Styrofoam tombstones, snakes, spiders, bones, and black roses crowded the front yard. “Oh, I’m in every store — Home Depot, Lowes, Home Goods. I mean, every store … It’s a tradition.”

Behind every wonderfully over-the-top window display and frighteningly decked out home lies a Halloween story as South Philadelphian as rushing down to Delaware Avenue for as many blinking Halloween lights and spooky spiders that can be squeezed into the front window of a rowhouse — or a few feet of sidewalk.

Like that 12-foot skeleton on the sidewalk 12th Street in East Passyunk. Monique Gubitosi had to put her name on a waiting list at the South Philly Home Depot just to get. She wanted the eye-grabbing decoration for her children — Gemma and Gabriel — who are also crazy about Halloween — and to honor the memory of her late husband, Peter, who died suddenly of a heart attack during the pandemic. Her husband had bought her an elegant skeleton decoration one year, and always told her how much he loved her decorating.

“I guess it reminds me of him,” she said, adding that putting it up has helped her grieve.

It also garnered her first place in the Gubitosi Halloween decorating competition, no easy feat considering her sister-in-law down the street boasted an actual pumpkin patch.

“I had three huge pumpkins growing and the city came and gave me a ticket,” said Viann Gubitosi, showing photos of the patch she said sprouted up from the cracks in the concrete after last year’s pumpkins went to seed in the winter. “It was just like Cinderella. Nobody grows pumpkins in South Philly!”

There are the smaller decorations and details that may go unnoticed, like the haunting two-headed doll Karen DeVarti made from decorations she found at the 99 cents store — and hand-painted for her front window on South Warnock Street.

“I’ve had neighbors tell me that my window is not as family friendly,” she said, smiling with delight. “But I don’t mind. I love it.

The neon-painted pumpkins — carved with different faces on each side — strung across the Halloween archway Alison Horn, 39 and her partner Sean Dooley, 34, constructed on South Hicks Street.

And the crime scene tape wrapped around the huge, inflatable T-Rex Dinosaur, known as “Terry” on South 13th Street — a block famous for its Christmas decorations and one of South Philly’s most popular trick-or-treating destinations. The inflatable dino was just one of about 50 skeleton-themed decorations Zoe and Andrew Fox and their daughter Liliana, 3, put out this year. The family had to repair the dinosaur this year after finding it deflated when someone tried to steal it last Halloween.

“The T-Rex rides again!” Zoe said.

Amid all the fun and fright, there are some South Philly homes that simply look beautiful for Halloween. Like Bill and Dana Mastro’s 13th Street townhouse, decorated like a haunted cemetery, and worthy of a movie set, complete with fog machines, hanging skeletons, and cheesecloth cobwebs that Bill made from scratch.

The couple moved onto 13th Street in 2020, in love with the block’s holiday spirit — the excitement and sense of community that something as simple as decorations can bring.

“I thought this is what a city block should feel like,” he said of the Halloween fun.