Spooky sights in Concord Hills
Mother, 91, daughter team up to put on annual Halloween lawn show, get 160+ trick-or-treaters
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Clarabelle Remeta, 91, and her daughter, Diane Remeta Riey, outside in front of Clarabelle’s Concord Hills home decorated for Halloween. - Photos by Alan Sloan
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You likely would be hard-pressed to find a Halloween home yard exhibit as elaborate in spooky things, both large and small, and fun special effects as can be found during the last half of October each year in Concord Hills.
Clarabelle Remeta, 91, and her daughter, Diane Remeta Riley, are the masterminds of this eye-catching display in Clarabelle’s yard on two streets corners of the subdivision, where a giant inflated black cat (photo, far right) skeleton horseback riders and Dracula continuously rising and laying back down in his casket — just to name three things among scores of displays — fill the front and one side of her yard.
Having lived in Concord Hills for 43 years, Clarabelle said this all started about 30 years ago. Though her late husband, Richard Remeta, “wasn’t fond of a lot of decorations, he told me I could buy a big pumpkin,” Clarabelle said.
“We just kept adding,” Riley said. “It grew on (Richard), but he didn’t have much of a choice.”
With a record 169 children, teenagers — and even a few adults — as trick-or-treat visitors in 2022, “I love to see the kids,” Clarabelle said. “And they look so cute in their costumes. Almost all of them say, ‘thank you, ma’am.’”
A lot of thought goes into handling trick-or-treators: on top of Clarabelle being known for giving out big candy bars, there are two entrances. “Usually the parents, where the kids are afraid of the graveyard-(lined) entrance, we just tell them to come this way,” Riley said about the “pumpkin patch” entrance along the home’s driveway. “A lot of the older kids like the graveyard entrance — and there’s a lot of lights at night.”
Their exhibit even served as a social hub during COVID in 2020. “I had-my son (Richard Jr.) fix a 6-foot pole with a net on the end, and we put the candy in that,” Clarabelle said.
While each year’s display has it’s own flavor, Riley said certain special effects — mainly lighting — come to life at night, including blue lights (“water”) around the skeleton boat (right).
