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A Halloween skeleton display in the yard of Ron Pippin's home in Ogden, photographed on Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2022. It shows a witch, giant and headless horseman chasing three terrified skeletons.

Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

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Ron Pippin poses with his Halloween skeleton display in the yard of his Ogden home on Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2022. The display shows a witch, giant and headless horseman chasing three terrified skeletons.

Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

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Joel Frederiksen poses with a pair of skeletons in the yard of his West Haven home on Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2022. The display features several skeletons playing croquet, including the two in front of Frederiksen dueling with croquet mallets.

Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

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Ron Pippin adjusts one of the skeletons that's part of a Halloween skeleton display in the yard of his Ogden home on Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2022. The display shows a witch, giant and headless horseman chasing three terrified skeletons.

Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

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OGDEN — It started during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

People were holed up their homes, face-to-face contact had been whittled to a minimum and some were going stir crazy. “Everybody was just so removed from everything. Everybody was bored,” said Ron Pippin.

In a bid to try to counter that, he seized on a plan — put up some Halloween decorations in his yard, get his neighbors talking, make them smile. It’s continued, but what started with a few skeletons has grown, and, for the third year in a row, he finds himself in his yard every day in October, taking down one skeleton display and putting up a new one.

He’s got a couple of 7-foot-tall skeletons, one that’s 12-feet tall and several normal- and kid-sized ones, which he’ll arrange into elaborate displays depicting varying scenes. There’s been a wedding ceremony, a Christmas scene (of all things), a giant skeleton seemingly lifting a pickup, a giant, a witch and a headless horseman giving chase to three terrified skeletons and more.

“Now I’m just getting out of hand,” he joked.

Call him the Ogden Skeleton Man — that’s his Instagram handle, anyway — but Pippin isn’t alone.

To the west in West Haven, Joel Frederiksen independently seized on a similar scheme, also during the pandemic in 2020, also in a bid to bolster neighborhood spirits, so to speak. Frederiksen also makes a new arrangement of skeletons in his yard each day during October, aiming to spread Halloween cheer and brighten the day of his neighbors or whoever else happens to pass by.

“I’ve got people driving by and taking pictures every day. It’s taken over my life for one month,” said Frederiksen, a retired school principal and teacher. This year, his displays have depicted skeletons engaged in games of varied sorts — croquet, bowling, Jenga, an adult skeleton going down a slide while several child-sized skeletons wait and more.

Frederiksen said his two sisters, one in the West Weber area and one in Alabama, have also started putting up their own displays. He notes with a sniff, though, that his Alabama sister always seems to keep her skeletons seated.

“To put them in a chair is easy. To stand them up is something else,” Frederiksen said.

Indeed, creating the displays and getting them to properly pose can require a major effort (along with a lot of duct tape, rebar, wires, zip ties and more).

Fredriksen remembers one display earlier this month showing two skeletons kneeling on the backs of three other skeletons that were on the ground on their hands and knees. “That took me four hours to set up. They kept falling,” he said.

Pippin sometimes spends hours creating the props the skeltons use — cardboard shields and swords for one display, for instance. Then there’s the pressure to constantly come up with new ideas for displays, day after day for 31 days.

“You’ve got to be mental to do this,” Frederiksen said.

But both he and Pippin, who lives on Ogden’s East Bench, love it, love the laughs the displays get from passersby, love getting the creative juices flowing to create a display. “My goal is to put a smile on someone’s face,” said Frederiksen.

He recalls the anonymous message left one year by a woman still mourning the passing of her husband. She saw the skeletons in his yard, she wrote, “and they brought me joy again.”

Wednesday morning, after Pippin finished the display featuring the witch, the giant and the headless horseman, several passing people — on foot, on bike, in cars — stopped to admire the work.

“Thank you very much,” said one man. “You make my entire month.”