Scary good decorations

It's safe to say that Dr. Mark Radowich's Halloween celebrations have grown to monstrous proportions.

Just one look at Frankenstein's monster standing at the entrance to his driveway in Severna Park is a dead giveaway. If that doesn't do the trick, keep on walking up the path, past the man squirming under a lawn mower, and enter his two-car garage.

Radowich, a radiologist, uses a frightening amount of creativity to transform the space into a haunted house worthy of most amusement parks.

Ghosts jump out at you, as does an Elvis, and visitors walk through a maze of rooms filled with spiders, snakes and spooky creatures of every variety. There are plenty of scary sounds, too, like a blaring horn and the doctor's maniacal voice-overs.

Dr. Rad, as he's known for Halloween - it says so on the name tag of his blood-spattered lab coat (relax, it's food coloring) - is just one of several county residents who scares up all available resources for the holiday. They transform their homes into haunted attractions, spending time and money to delight visitors of all ages - and themselves.

"Well, you know, I don't hunt, I don't fish and I don't golf, so I build things," Radowich explained.

It all started as a way to celebrate his 40th birthday. Since he was born in mid-October, the party took on a Halloween theme. Radowich even built the Frankenstein monster for the occasion.

"Things sort of (got) out of control after that," he explained.

Fifteen years later, Radowich is still constantly expanding his animatronic arsenal. It's been going on so long that the infamous green monster is on his third motor, he quipped.

He designs everything himself, though some basic plans come off the Internet.

"I like listening to people enjoy it," he said. "I can tell where people are based on how they 'enjoy' it" - i.e., he pays attention to their screams.

Although Radowich rules out buying a bigger house with a bigger garage to accommodate his ever-growing ghoulish army, he has no plans to curtail his hobby.

"It shows no signs of stopping," he said.

Grave matters

Speaking of signs, there's one on a windy road in Cape St. John bound to catch people's attention. Not too far from the water is "Eerie Acres Cemetery."

It's George Cook's personal boneyard, complete with lots of skeletons - some looking rather juicy thanks to soda bottles, spray foam and old nylons - as well as spiders and tombstones.

Cook, who owns a garage door company, doesn't do much in the way of Christmas, so Halloween is his time to shine.

For the past three years, he's transformed the side yard of his Cape St. John home into the graveyard.

"I'm a kid," Cook said with a smile. "I'm a 12-year-old kid. I've always loved Halloween."

When he was an actual kid, Cook and his friends would go to a local cemetery on Halloween and see how long they could stay before getting spooked. Usually, it was about 15 minutes, he said.

He hopes visitors to his home will stay as long as they want. He only averages 10 to 20 trick-or-treaters, but he doesn't get buried in his work just for them. It's for anyone who stops by the house for the entire month of October.

"I get to enjoy it for a full month," he said, breaking into a wide grin.

The only thing Cook regrets is that he couldn't take his haunted attraction further than he did. The recession cramped his spooky style, he explained.

"It's been a tough year," he said. "This is really a recession cemetery."

Nevertheless, Cook said he's hopeful that he can scare up some more resources next year.

Path of destruction

Make no bones about it: Pasadena resident John Iorio is also big into Halloween haunts. His front yard is an amalgam of Radowich's and Cook's ideas, blending a few animatronics with just plain spooky stuff.

A huge snake rises from his mailbox, a diseased rat jumps from a cage, a fountain spews blood, and a monster hacks away at flesh with a smoking chainsaw. There's also a giant set of ribs coming up out of the ground, so large that it almost serves as a kind of arbor, and macabre machinations run all the way up to his front door.

One year, he sawed a car in half and stuck it in the ground, so the bones seem quite tame by comparison, though they make it look like a mammoth is buried in his yard.

"I do it for the kids," said Iorio, whose skills as a machinist come in handy during construction. "We don't get a lot of trick-or-treaters. I have to attract them here. At night, when it's pitch black, it really looks good."

He's been cooking up disturbing decorations from scratch for about 16 years. It started in the basement of his home for a Halloween party and grew from there, he said. His daughter, Samantha, 21, was a child then, but now helps out with the haunting.

"I love it," she said. "It's fun to do."

Iorio said he'll take down the Halloween decorations in about two weeks. Just in time to start his Christmas preparations.