Lake Zurich couple starts online Halloween store
Sandy Jenner carefully placed an eyeball into a decaying skull as her 3-year-old daughter Madison ran around the house, dodging tombstones that were scattered about.
Everyone needs a hobby, and for the Jenners of Lake Zurich it is turning skeletons into corpses.
Sandy and Derrick Jenner turned their normal suburban home in the Chasewood North subdivision into a ghoulish, haunted house for Halloween using decorations they made themselves.
What began five years ago as creating simple Halloween decorations for their house has become a weekend project they embark on every October with lots of help from their friends.
“We started small, and every year it kept growing and growing until we started making our own props, Derrick Jenner said. “The ones from the local stores just seemed to be too generic. They weren't as durable as we would like. We wanted to make our yard look like a real graveyard instead of the stuff you see normally. You wouldn't generally see bats and gargoyles and skulls on many of the tombstones in other graveyards, and we wanted ours to have more of an authentic feel to it.
The most frightening aspect of the graveyard is the realistic corpses and skeletons that are placed around the yard and creep out of the ground.
The Jenners create these from blow-molded plastic skeletons purchased from an online store. They reinforce the bones together, use latex to adhere fake skin and ligaments to the skeleton, and apply stains, colorings and decorations to make the corpses look like they just came out of a coffin.
After meeting some people at the Halloween convention in Rosemont, they decided to start an online store called frightstore.com. The site went up in June.
It offers life-size tombstones, arm bones, leg bones, full skeletons and corpsified skulls constructed by the Jenners.
“We are very passionate about this, Derrick Jenner said. “We like building them, and there are only so many props that you can put in one yard. It is a great hobby ... It's our passion.