Carroll Gardens, the neighbourhood where I live in Brooklyn, is famous for two things: Italian food and annual Halloween decorations.
One historic brownstone sticks out from the others: each October its owners adorn the exterior of the building with a plethora of lurid, fantastical furnishings. There’s a skeleton dangling in a cage. A bloody baby, its head pulled off, in a pram. A corpse hanging by its neck from an upstairs window. A zombie girl on a swing. And, most gruesome of all, a ‘prisoner’ in an orange jumpsuit in an electric chair, his eyes squeezed shut in pain, his mouth set in a tight grimace. A mechanism makes his limbs and body shake.
