Bethel Park yard screams Halloween

Welcome to Kings School Cemetery, at least for the Halloween season.

That’s what the sign says in the suitably decorated yard of Bethel Park resident Joe Villella.”

“Every year, we have a different theme,” he said. “Last year, I had a carnival theme.”

Whatever he and his family members choose to feature, their home serves as an October showcase for the creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky.

The property’s configuration, along a sharp Kings School Road bend, allows for passersby to take long looks at petrifying props that mostly are Joe’s creations. He did start with purchases from stores, but product quality tended to be an issue.

“One thing led to another, and I just started building all of them,” he said, and materials such as chicken wire and polyvinyl chloride are prime components. “I’ll get PVC pipe, and I use Styrofoam head from Michaels or Walmart. The costumes aren’t homemade, but I’ll buy them at a good rate.”

Combine all of that with partial mannequins known as dressmaker forms — courtesy of his late father, also named Joe, who owned dry cleaners — and bunches of ghouls, ghosts, witches and werewolves greet anyone who dares to stare.

And while Gary Lewis and the Playboys’ 1965 hit assures us that “Everybody Loves a Clown,” Villella begs to differ:

“Everybody’s afraid of clowns.”

With characters like Stephen King’s Pennywise spreading fear instead of cheer, figures of pasty-faced circus entertainers fit right in Kings School Cemetery. So, of course, do imitation tombstones marked with cleverly appropriate names — “Cy Yon Nora,” “Dee Cayon,” “Lon Gawn,” “U.R. Next” — and overseen by a not-so-nice nun.

Perched prominently on the front porch is the family’s first foreboding prop, a veiled apparition called Victoria, her place not far from a fake-knife-wielding Michael Myers from the film “Halloween.” A short distance away stands a woman dressed in red, her perturbing presence augmented by a cranial concavity.

“I bought her on sale, and that dent wasn’t supposed to be in her head. But I said, ‘That kind of looks cool,’” Villella recalled. “If they look pretty, that wouldn’t be a good thing. Right?”

Come November, the challenge of clearing of the yard starts.

“Most of it goes in my basement, back behind my furnace,” Villella said, a viable storage arrangement for the most part.

Then there was the time a friend went downstairs to perform furnace maintenance:

“Probably two minutes later, he yells for me. So I go down, and he’s like, ‘Please get those things out of here,’ because the nun was staring at him while he was trying to work.”

Actually, Villella gets a kick out of his minions eliciting that type of reaction.

“Before I bring them out, I’ll set them all up in the basement on purpose, so I’ll hear my kids scream eventually, or my wife, when they go down into the basement,” he said. “Or the werewolf will stand at the top of the steps, and nobody will expect him to be there. And he’s big. He’s over 6 feet tall.”

Nevertheless, wife Christy, son Lucas and daughter Ava would seem to enjoy the macabre as much as Dad.

“When we go places, we like to make sure we do the haunted history. We went to Salem last year,” Joe said about the Massachusetts witch-trial town, “which was super cool.”

Back at home, he has plenty of ideas for adding to his Halloween collection. A recent one involves Georgie Denbrough, Pennywise’s 6-year-old first victim in King’s novel “It.”

“There’s a prop I saw. I said, you know what? I have a perfect raincoat. I have the PVC pipe downstairs. I might make him,” Villella said. “It doesn’t take me long to do.”