For Ryan Carlisle, of Hampton, Halloween is the most wonderful time of the year.

"They call me the Halloween guy," laughed Mr. Carlisle, 37. "People say it's my Christmas."

There's good reason. For two or three days each October, he transforms his small yard on Linden Avenue into a fog-filled cemetery, loaded with tombstones, homemade creepy things that move and a full-size gallows.

As in the last eight years, anyone who dares to venture onto his property for trick-or-treating Saturday is in for yet another of Mr. Carlisle's famous garage shows.

This year, his 11/2-car garage will become a morgue, featuring a fake dead guy on a gurney and a real vintage embalming machine that has been gutted -- no pun intended -- and now just gurgles water via a fish aquarium pump.

"You have to do something that scares the kids a little bit," Mr. Carlisle said. "Otherwise they'll be disappointed."

At midday a week before Halloween, Mr. Carlisle took the day off work to do a little fiddling with his homemade props.

He'll take more days off from his job as a customer service technician at Guardian Protection Services the closer it gets to the big night. For now, though, there's still a lot of work to be done.

At the opening of his garage, a 5-foot grim reaper is off to the side, rotating slowly back and forth. Mr. Reaper still needs a sickle.

On the floor is the upper half of a zombie Mr. Carlisle built from parts he bought online and from local stores. Kent Breathe will sit in front of a tombstone in Mr. Carlisle's front yard. Kent, whose innards are made of chicken wire, welded metal and plastic piping, will move his arms and make spooky breathing noises as he tries to get out of his grave. He's nearly done.

With the help of air pressure system that Mr. Carlisle is still working on, the dead guy on the gurney will sit up and scream, just after his gurney sprays unsuspecting trick or treaters with a burst of air. His toe tag, by the way, is real, Mr. Carlisle pointed out.

The condemned life-size man dressed in everyday working clothes with a pillowcase over his head who will hang and kick from the gallows is near the back of the garage awaiting repairs. His motor burned out last year right at the end of trick-or-treat.

"At least he waited until 8 o'clock," Mr. Carlisle said.

Mr. Carlisle said he's always liked Halloween and can trace his zeal to about eight years ago when his mother, who worked at Kmart, bought him Halloween decorations on clearance.

"I felt compelled," he said. "My mom gave me all this stuff, and I figured I should use it."

So he did up his yard for Halloween that first year, and things have become more elaborate ever since.

Mr. Carlisle uses regular paint and dresses his props in clothes from Goodwill. He makes his fiends move with air or windshield wiper motors. He buys feet, hands and heads either online or in stores and then pieces them together, depending on which kind of effect he's after.

He adds music and soundtracks to the props, each independently controlled with switches or timers.

"It can be very stressful," said Mr. Carlisle. "The tough part is figuring out how to sequence it. The details is where it's at."

Mr. Carlisle is a tinkerer who, as a child in West Deer, would take things apart to see how they worked and then put them back together, but he will still use store-bought decorations. A nightgown-clad, child-sized moving ghoul with stringy long, black hair, white face, red lips and black-rimmed eyes that light scares many. She has a knife in one hand, a head in the other.

While she might end up in Mr. Carlisle's yard this weekend, she spends her pre-Halloween days in his bedroom behind a window intentionally boarded up with broken, crooked planks that fronts the street.

Mr. Carlisle isn't immune to a little fright.

Once, he was alone in his garage at night welding something for one of his ghouls. The protective goggles he was wearing limited his line of sight and dimmed everything on the periphery of his vision.

He kept hearing noises coming from his driveway, or so he thought. The third time he heard the noise he turned around and got a jolt when he caught a glimpse of the grim reaper.

"He scared the hell out of me," Mr. Carlisle said. "I thought someone was in here."

Mr. Carlisle estimates about 150 trick-or-treaters visit his house, which he has named "Spider Hill." Outside, they see his cemetery, lit from several directions to intentionally cast shadows on just the right props.

Coordinated thunder (an audio track) and lightning (strobe lights) will welcome any and all to the morgue.

Mr. Carlisle's family and friends will help usher into the garage small groups of children, probably four or five at a time. Inside, they will meet Mr. Carlisle, playing the part of a mad professor, and get a look at the dead gurney guy and all his trappings under specially mounted black lights.

Sirens will wail. Children will scream, and everything will be exactly as it should be.

"All the work and all the time ... it's worth it," Mr. Carlisle said. "The kids expect a show."

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