Eyes follow you wherever you go at David Lady’s home in the small village of Chatfield in northern Ohio. Frankenstein monsters scowl from a shelf. Wide-eyed vampires show off their fangs. And werewolves look like they might pounce off the walls.
“One nice thing, we never get lonely,” Lady said, as he waved to a skeleton in the corner of his hallway.
Lady has more than 400 monster masks. Some are rare collectibles, but most he crafted from hand in a small workshop. Each has their own name and story, including his latest creation.
“I think it's the first female pumpkin. This is Jackie Lantern, I call her,” he said, picking up the unfinished product. “This is one out of the mold, obviously, unpainted and everything.”
Like all of his masks, the pumpkin with pursed lips and leafy locks began as a clay sculpture that Lady turned into a plaster mold. Then, he pours latex into the cast and hand-paints on each eerie detail. Not every mask is menacing, but they all are monsters.
“I have had the same characters and monsters with me since I was a little kid,” Lady said.
A spooky start
Lady was born on Halloween – same as his mother. Together, on their birthdays, they celebrated all things spooky.
“It became a sentimental holiday. I was the kid that always wanted to keep the paper skeletons up all year round and wouldn't put away the spooky stuff,” Lady remembered. “The earliest toy I can remember having is a little Bela Lugosi Dracula model.”
As a child, he rifled through catalogs in search of the creepiest masks. It didn’t take long for Lady to begin making his own.
“See that green guy right next to that blue light? He's in a black hood and he's kind of got double cheekbones,” Lady said, pointing past the rows of aliens and mummies. “That was the first one that I made. I was a kid in my mom’s basement and made him.”
Lady’s Halloween haven
Now, the masks are Lady’s livelihood. He sells them for upwards of $100 a mask.
He makes sure to save at least one of each design to hang up in his home, an old hotel guarded by gargoyles. For years, his devilishly decorated house served as the setting for his own local TV program, ‘The Late Dr. Lady Show’, where he’d review scary movies and use his masks for silly skits.
And for years, every October, he would open his home up as a haunted attraction and give tours of the 17 rooms of the old hotel in rural northern Ohio. There’s a room for zombies, a room for aliens and an evil laboratory.
“You would come in here as part of the horror hotel tour and there would be a different experiment taking place each Halloween and a different little story,” Lady said gesturing to the futuristic room, filled to the brim with beakers.
Behind the mask
Those Halloween traditions have fallen to the wayside. Lady said he’s just too old now to organize them. But he hasn’t outgrown inventing monsters. He continues to make masks with the help of his wife, Laura.
She threads the hair onto each ghoulish creation. Her wardrobe is filled with tufts of all types. Some are wigs, some are human hair. Dark curls peeped out of one drawer in her office, but the couple can’t quite remember whose head it’s been on.
“Was it a yeti? What was it?,” Laura asked.
“A teen wolf, wasn’t it?” David said. Laura shakes her head.
“Wasn't it a hunchback?”
They settle on bionic Bigfoot, but the possibilities are endless.The pair is always working on something new. They sell two or three masks a week.
Some go to trick or treaters. Others are used for displays at haunted houses, monster museums and theme parks. Back when he lived in Los Angeles, some even made it into some low-budget movies.
“There's not as much movie work for monsters as there used to be because they're all done with CGI now,” David Lady despaired.
Still, Lady’s masks are able to find a home. Many times, Lady is happy to see that they end up with other collectors, people like him, who appreciate the work that goes into carving creepy smiles.
“They can tell the love has gone into making it right and making it something special.”
