CLINTON - People driving on North Jackson Street in Clinton these days automatically slow down in the 400 block, especially at night.

Sometimes they stop, then go on slowly. Sometimes they stop and get out of the car and stand, just staring.

It's fun, said Holly Andrews, to watch viewers' facial expressions from her home office. She knows they are taking it all in, the tombstone-filled front yard, the garage fa§ade resembling a weather-worn mausoleum for the Andrews family, the eerie ghost floating up and down in the living room window.

This intricately-decorated yard belongs to Bob Andrews, costumed this year as Jack the Ripper, and his wife, Holly Andrews.

"I'm always a witch of some sort," she said.

They are a Halloween family. Married just shy of three years, they even met in a Halloween chat room on the Internet.

Continuing a tradition he started at about age 14 and she has done since she can remember, this year they created a haunted tea party. The theme fills the front yard and the garage, then spills into the back yard of their Clinton home. They start planning a year in advance and know already that next year's theme will be a haunted masquerade.

Nearly every display has animation.

"Motors are easier to come by than actors," said Holly Andrews.

The skeletal ladies partaking of the tea party treats sit among table items floating up and down. The grandfather clock, whose face has 13 as its only number, has a pendulum that looks like it speeds the clock hand backward. The hearse, reminiscent of one from a century past, is pulled by a skeletal horse, the head of which moves.

And with rare exception - the skeletons are purchased from medical supply houses - everything was built and designed by the Andrews couple.

"Bob started in July," said Holly Andrews.

That was soon after the couple moved to Clinton, buying their home from someone who had been an active participant in the community's well-known Terror on Washington Street haunted house. When the Andrews found that out, the house purchase seemed fortuitous.

As for the decorations, the skeletal horse has a real horse head skull, purchased on eBay, but the remainder of the skeleton Bob Andrews built after extensive study to pay attention to detail. The same is true for the Andrews' mausoleum fa§ade on the garage. The exterior look was created, according to Holly Andrews, with multiple coats of paint, again paying attention to such details as the sort of cracks that come with time.

They even make their own spider webs. It's a combination, said Holly Andrews, of using hot glue and compressed air. And while she has been known to create fog by using an iron and a fan, they now use fog machines to create the eerie effect.

Since it is obvious they've decorated for Halloween, the Andrews family invited their neighbors and other visitors to stop by. Their final, free public opening will be from dark to 9 p.m. Halloween night.

"We dressed up Sunday (Oct. 23) and passed out flyers," said 14-year-old Stacey McCorkle, to invite people. "It was cold."

The family includes Stacey's twin, Tracey, and their sister, Makayla McCorkle, 10, all Holly Andrews' daughters.

While this haunting might be scary to some, there are clues the Andrews family has fun being tongue-in-cheek.

Among the front yard field of tombstones stands one proclaiming, "Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum."

That's a sort of Latin translation, said Bob Andrews, for the line from the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" when Chuckles the Clown dies, "A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants."

Then there is the animated skeleton "playing and singing" at an organ while lip-synching "Pieces of Me," the same song Ashlee Simpson lip-synched on the "Saturday Night Live" television show.

Arlene Mannlein can be reached at amannlein@;herald-review.com or 421-6976.