Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

A few carved pumpkins or a stuffed dummy in a chair may cut it for some people in the weeks leading up to Halloween — but others want more. Much more.

“I scare a lot of kids. There have been kids who wouldn’t walk to the door,” Gaylene Stewart said cheerfully as she adjusted eerie decorations in front of her daughter’s Lindenhurst home on a recent warm and blustery afternoon. “Sometimes I have to take the candy out to them in the street.”

It isn’t that Stewart sets out to scare people. She said the goal is to give local children, including her grandchildren, a fun thrill — the kind that leaves them laughing as they skitter off with a chill running up their spines.

Stewart, who also goes all out on Christmas decorations, said her Halloween odyssey began in 2004 when her granddaughter was 8 years old. That’s when she purchased a skeleton decoration at a pumpkin stand on Highway C in Wisconsin.

Since then her collection has grown exponentially.

“I’ve probably spent a grand on Halloween stuff,” she said, explaining that she doesn’t purchase decorations at stores because she can find similar and cheaper items secondhand by searching online.

Stewart’s spooky collection of toys includes a skeleton rising from the ground, blow up decorations for the younger kids, a coffin with a nasty surprise inside and, as a centerpiece, a very large and very creepy monster hanging by a rope from a tree in the front yard of her daughter and son-in-law’s Chestnut Circle home.

It doesn’t all come together until Halloween though, when the kids come out to trick-or-treat.

“You have to have the strobe lights flashing, the scary music playing,” she said. “But I never put those things out until Halloween Day.”

To the east, Chris Lanning and D.J. Allen have already completed their annual Halloween masterpiece in the large front yard of their Sheridan Road home in Waukegan.

While their elaborate set-up includes a few token monsters, this is art. Life-sized main characters from the “Wizard of Oz” stand hand in hand on one side of the yard, while the Peanuts gang plays under a well-lighted section on the other side.

Colored lights are choreographed to give the yard the look of theater.

“We’ve always done it every year we’ve lived here,” Lanning said Thursday night. “We get a lot of trick-or-treaters.”

So many, in fact, that last year they had to set up a rope line similar to those used for amusement park rides to keep things orderly.

The themes of their decorations are not geared toward scares.

“We do it for the kids’ and the neighbors’ enjoyment,” Lanning said. “It’s all kid-friendly. It’s not about frightening everybody.”

Allen and Lanning put plenty of time and effort into the annual project.

Lanning said that for the Peanuts display, they found the characters online, used a projector to enlarge their likenesses, and traced them onto thick cardboard that was then covered with Polyurethane to protect it from the elements.

“We take pride in the house and the neighborhood,” Lanning said.

The Schrader house in Grandwood Park is more subtle than some of the larger productions, but walk your dog past it after dark and you may be in for a jolt.

By day, the house sports Halloween decorations that exceed the norm, but aren’t outlandish.

At night, things change.

More Top Picks Best Mountain Bike Helmets For Men

A grim reaper decoration, cut to fit two large window panes in the front of the house, glows and glares eerily and realistically at those passing by.

Most of the Halloween work is done by Jeanne Schrader, who lives in the home with husband Jamie and son Kyle.

“I do this every year. I love it,” Jeanne said this week. “I definitely think Halloween is about the decorations, not the candy.”

“I add stuff every year,” said Jeanne, adding that she has been at it since 1999.

Kyle, 22, noted that the decorations can get in the way of his hockey team flags, but he still finds it hard to argue with his mother’s sense of style.

“Halloween decorations have really gotten more elaborate over the past several years,” he said.

Lindenhurst resident Stewart noted that, ironically, she was raised in a religious environment in which Halloween was taboo, but she has gotten well past that.

“To me, I’m not worshiping it or anything,” Stewart said. “It’s all in good fun.”

[email protected]

Twitter @jimnewton5