hoveringmax
A wildly popular Halloween display at a suburban Chicago home has been shut down after a neighbor complained.
“Everyone seemed OK with it, until they weren’t,” said Aubrey Appel, who created the display with her husband, Dave. “It’s upsetting, you know, to be told ‘We support you. We’re behind you. We understand why you are doing this’ and to have that blow up in your face.”
A video of the display got millions of views on TikTok, and crowds started showing up on Whispering Oaks Court, a cul-de-sac in Plainfield, Illinois.
Its centerpiece was a mannequin of the “Stranger Things” character Max Mayfield that hovers 10 feet in the air above the driveway, with no apparent wires or other support.
But since Sunday, Max is no longer levitating, and the rest of the yard isn’t lit up.
The Appels say they shut it down because a neighbor accused them of bringing negative attention to the neighborhood and endangering children.
The couple plans to meet with Plainfield village officials to make sure everything adheres to codes and regulations before they decide whether to welcome spectators again.
Dave Appel told “Good Morning America” that the couple put in 1,500 hours in creating the Halloween display, which includes the creepy twisted vines and blackened trees of the nightmarish world in the Netflix hit. “We were watching the new season of ‘Stranger Things,’ … and I’m like, ‘I believe we can do this whole set in pool noodles,'” he said.
Once they hit on the idea of the floating Max, it took them a month of testing and tweaking to get it right. For days when it’s too windy for Max to go up, a second version sits on the ground by a headstone.
In addition to the “Stranger Things” sector, the yard has dozens of other pop culture horror references. “We have killer clowns, Pennywise, pet cemeteries, we have ‘Alien,’ we have ‘Predator,'” Dave Appel told NBC Chicago. “People can pick them out and call them out — that’s amazing.”
Originally published at Cnn Com Wire Service