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These spooky clowns, above, adorn Donna Smith's Allen Park yard.Halloween kidnapped by grown-ups
Silly adults: Tricks, treats are for kids
Debbie Sosa of Troy, left, adjusts the lights on a Halloween tree display that features a Day of the Dead skeleton from Mexico.
Dressing the part
What's your favorite Halloween costume ever?
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Three days before Halloween, residents in wigs and rubber masks are celebrating already by donning costumes, attending parties and visiting haunted houses.
And that's just the adults.
Like a bully snatching Halloween candy from a child, grown-ups are threatening to seize the holiday for themselves, businesses said.
A more genial way of putting it, sociologists said, is that adults liked Halloween so much as children they brought it with them into their later years.
"It's fun," said Debbie Sosa, 49, a Troy resident who lavishly decorates her home, yard and daughter's elementary school for the holiday. "It's really fun. I love Halloween."
More Halloween costumes are bought for adults than children, according to the National Costumers Association.
Haunted houses in Metro Detroit say most of their visitors are older than 18.
Children aren't the ones visiting local stores to buy 6-foot rubber spiders with fur ($75), latex upper torsos of decaying men ($59.99), and plastic pizza with eyeball toppings ($29.99. Ears are extra).
It's the Year the Adults Stole Halloween.
"It's one of those nostalgic holidays where you can go back to your childhood for one night," said Chris Riddle, a trend expert with American Greetings Corp., a Cleveland card maker.
All those frustrated trick-or-treaters have turned Halloween into the second-biggest holiday for sales of decorations, said the National Retail Federation. Christmas is first. The $3.3 billion industry is expected to grow 5 percent this year despite sluggishness in other types of retail. And that's just for Halloween.
Halloween no longer can be held to a single day. The burgeoning phenomenon -- from haunted hayrides to pet costumes to theme days at amusement parks -- now stretches over the month of October.
Holiday has pagan start
Even before adults tried to appropriate it, Halloween had a penchant for changing guises.
Born in pagan ritual more than 2,000 years ago, Christianity cleaned up some of the customs and incorporated them into the church with All Saints Day.
The holiday has gone from pagan to Christian to secular. Who knew the festival of the dead could be so popular?
As opposed to the light-hearted fun of today, the Celts originated the festival to mark the beginning of the season of cold, darkness and decay.
Priests appeased the spirits of the dead by sacrificing horses and cats, some historians believe. Sometimes they offered the lives of criminals.
Two millennia later, southeast Michigan likes the holiday for different reasons.
It allows adults to feel young again, residents said. It's fun to pretend to be somebody else. It provides a respite from their hum-drum lives.
It's just fun, period.
"It's a way to put on a new identity for a few hours," Sarah Marchi said while hunting for a witch hat at Halloween USA in Clinton Township.
Adults dress up homes
The ghosts who supposedly roamed the earth on Halloween Past have been replaced by the adults of Halloween Present.
They dress up themselves, their kids, their homes, even their dogs.
One of the more popular pet outfits at Halloween USA is the $14.99 Darth Vader costume, with mechanical box, 8 inches to 22, neck to tail.
As for gussying up one's home, Donna Smith, 48, can't picture herself just giving out candy on Halloween. Too boring, she said.
So the Allen Park resident goes the other route. For 11 years, she has set up an elaborate display in her yard to scare the neighborhood kids.
It has the usual -- skulls, skeletons, devils -- and the not-so-usual --a bloody car wreck and a toxic waste dump. To heighten the fear quotient, she adds fog, lighting, music and movable parts.
"I just like the excitement it brings everyone," Smith said.
Nearly 1,000 people, including many adults, visit the home on Halloween, which costs Smith and her husband a small bundle on candy.
She considered retiring the display after her son and accomplice, Matthew, went to college. But her neighbors wouldn't hear of it.
She's amazed by the reaction it draws. When strangers learn she's from Allen Park, they'll ask whether she's ever seen the "Halloween house."
"Yeah," she tells them. "I've been there."
Haunted can be profitable
The Fear Factory haunted house in Warren draws adults from Toledo to Toronto.
Co-owner Richard Barron said business has ballooned to 20,000 customers a year since its opening in 1997. One recent visitor was 72.
For $16, the young and young-at-heart creep through 15 rooms with real coffins, swinging heads (not real) and a clown with a chainsaw who lunges at them (could be real).
"We get all ages," Barron said. "Everybody likes to be scared."
The haunted house, which runs for a month from a former warehouse, doesn't make a lot of money but money isn't the reason Barron opened it, he said.
He earns a living by managing an auto repair shop. He has fun by managing the Fear Factory. At 43, he still loves Halloween.
When adults go ga-ga over something, Retail America isn't far behind. With Halloween, there's a whole strata of stores that exist only for the holiday.
Gags & Games Inc., a Livonia company that operates Halloween USA and Party USA stores in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, opens 40 temporary stores and converts 40 others to sell Halloween items this time of year. The shops draw as many adults as children, marketing director Amy Gajda said.
"It gives adults an excuse to dress up and throw a party," she said.
If you were eying that plus-size Hercules costume at Party America stores, forget about it. The polyester tunic and cape (machine wash cold) are out of stock.
But it's not too late to fill your other needs, like a screwdriver through the head, $14.99.
If you need a hand at the store, you can get one: severed, in latex, $15.99.
Tenisha Mercer contributed to this report. You can reach Francis X. Donnelly at (313) 223-4186 or fdonnelly@detnews.com.
Donna Smith of Allen Park and Madison Litterell, 7, of Flat Rock show off the Halloween decorations in Smith's front yard in Allen Park. Smith has been decorating her yard and adding to it for at least 10 years. "I just like the excitement it brings everyone," Smith says.
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