Halloween-loving homeowners have been known to show little restraint when decorating for the holiday, putting up taller and taller skeletons each year, or finding new and creative ways to scatter fake entrails and viscera across their lawns. But can Halloween decorations ever go too far, in terms of breaking the law?
Yes, they can. Although it’s not usually because of their content.
“Most decorations would be covered by the First Amendment,” Officer Christian Bruckhart of the New Haven Police Department in Connecticut told Nexstar.
Bruckhart went on to say there are indeed exceptions to the content a homeowner can display, just as there are exceptions to the First Amendment. Those might include decorations that include “explicit threats of violence” or “defamation of an individual,” he said. (For example, hanging an effigy of a neighbor, and then introducing a violent element which suggests imminent harm to the effigy, could be considered criminal if the neighbor believed the display amounted to a threat, Bruckhart suggested.)
A Halloween display might also rise to the category of a criminal violation if it were deemed too obscene to be covered under the First Amendment — for example, if it contained explicit violent or pornographic imagery.
“But I can’t think of an instance of something like happening in my experience and it would be situationally dependent,” Bruckhart said.
Aside from the content of a Halloween display, noise violations usually prompt more police visits during the spooky season, police say.
“Noise is a big thing,” Captain John Burke of the Salem Police Department in Massachusetts told Nexstar. “We’ve issued a ton of noise violations.”
But Burke, like Bruckhart, said these violations would target “not the decoration so much” but rather “the volume of the effect.” Because of this, Burke said he would recommend homeowners familiarize themselves with local ordinances before installing “anything that would make a loud noise, or something designed to scare someone walking by the house.”
Several police departments that spoke with Nexstar also warned against installing any decorations that might pose a risk of injury to motorists or pedestrians, lest the police (or the city’s building department) come knocking.
“Some possibilities could be a decoration that [is] too close to a power line, blocks a view at an intersection, or is constructed in a way that violates building codes,” Bruckhart said.
Burke, in Salem, also cautioned residents to avoid anything “so big or excessive that it could fall on someone.”
“We encourage residents to think about safety when they decorate,” Sgt. Chris Stinson, of the City of Charleston Police Department in South Carolina, said.
If, however, a homeowner happens to live in a community governed by a homeowners’ association, the rules for Halloween decorations can often be much more strict. Residents in these communities have been cited for such “offenses” as decorating too early, setting up a skeleton “strip club,” or daring to depict a scarecrow’s orange pumpkin butt.
Homeowners who don’t belong to any HOAs, meanwhile, likely wouldn’t have to worry if they put up similar displays.
“[Some] decorations might be in bad taste, or might disturb someone,” Burke said. “But we would be hard-pressed to remove things because they were in bad taste.”
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