This Detroit grandma's Halloween display takes on real-life horrors
LaRethia Haddon has always pulled out all the stops when it comes to decorating for the holidays. In fact, her husband’s birthday is Halloween, so she’s been crafting homemade dummies to decorate their yard for over 20 years.
“Last year, I just had one dummy in my yard and it was of a really realistic dead body, but it went viral and I couldn’t believe it,” Haddon tells CBS News.
This year, however, her grandchildren suggested she try something different.
“They said, ‘Well Grandma, if you’re going to get so much attention, you should do a display that makes a difference,’” Haddon recalls. “They said, ‘Children aren’t afraid of the boogeyman anymore.’ So I said, ‘Well what are they afraid of?’ And my little 5-year-old granddaughter looks up at me and says, ‘I’m afraid to go outside because I think someone’s gonna get me.’”
The little girl wasn’t alone. Haddon’s oldest grandchild, a 14-year-old girl, said she’d lost multiple friends to violence at the hands of others and that scared her.
Then Haddon says her grandson chimed in, “I don’t understand why there’s so many accidental police shootings. I know some people do bad things, but it just happens so much.”
Haddon got to work. She made a dummy of a mother holding two children that were murdered. The sign next to her reads, “Stop killing our children.”
She made a dummy of a predator, a carjacking victim, a terrorist’s backpack stuffed with mock explosives. She created a victim of a police shooting with a sign that reads, “My hands were up.” She even fashioned a dummy of a scientist holding a glass of contaminated water from Flint, Michigan.
“Everyone that comes by here has known someone that has been a victim of one of these things,” says Haddon. “I lost a child who was 9 years old to medical malpractice. I have family that live in Flint. And I may not have known any of those people in the terrorist attacks personally, but I don’t have to, to know how they feel. And until we all come together, this scene in my yard is going to keep being our reality.”
Haddon says the response from her community has been overwhelmingly positive.
“One lady was standing here crying for about ten minutes and I was sitting in my living room watching her. And I went outside and we just held each other,” says Haddon. “She said, ‘Thank you so much for doing this. I see it on the news all the time, but not like this.’ This is in your face. It really makes you think about what we need to be doing to try to stop these things.”
For Haddon, that’s what it’s all about: Spreading the message that people need to band together to fix our world. And as it turned out, Halloween — with all its focus on monsters and scary stories — presented a perfect opportunity for her to do that.
“These are the things that children are scared of right now. I teach my grandkids that not all police officers are bad, and that this is not only a black thing. This is all over the world. This is just a human thing. This is our reality right now,” says Haddon. “I go to three churches. And after bible study on Wednesdays, we all come here and make a circle around the display and pray for our city.”