Hillcrest Skeletons Are a Halloween Fixture

By Mina Rose Morales, Belmont Voice correspondent

Every October, Belmont’s Hillcrest Road comes alive with skeletons for Halloween, thanks to three women who started it all.

The tradition began many years ago in the backyard of Belmont resident Heidi Sawyer, where she hosted Halloween pizza parties for her kids. As the parties grew and more parents got involved, they shifted to the front of the house. With neighbors Sue Kelleher and Lisa Mehrez, the trio began hanging ghouls and other creatures from their trees, and then, burying upside-down dead people in the yard.

One Halloween, Sawyer saw skeletons in front of someone’s house, adopted the idea, Kelleher and Mehrez followed, and soon the entire Hillcrest community followed suit.

“I don’t know what year the first one was, but… I really don’t…It’s been going on like 15 years, I would say,” Sawyer said.

She recalled, however, the chaos of the first year, when the entire street participated and word got out.

“It was a zoo,” she said.

Kelleher, the only one from the trio who still lives on the street, remembers the effort they put into setting up the skeletons each year. She describes Sawyer as the “mastermind of ideas,” Mehrez as the “skeleton surgeon,” and herself as part idea mastermind, part laborer.

“On Halloween, we’ll probably have close to 4,000 people come, and they close the street down,” Kelleher said.

She described the different people she’s seen on the street weeks before Halloween. In particular, Kelleher remembers seeing students in buses, cars filled with elderly people, and multigenerational groups walking down the street.

Mehrez and Kelleher, both from Belmont, graduated from Belmont High together. Mehrez grew up on Hillcrest Road, left for a while, returned, and moved again. She recalled the time and heartfelt creativity the trio put into decorating the skeletons. The year her father passed away, she had a skeleton dressed as a surgeon. Another year, she dressed a skeleton in the ballet costume she wore as a child. Kelleher had a skeleton bride the year her daughter got married, and another year, a pregnant skeleton when her daughter was pregnant. They also display references to popular culture. One of Sawyer’s favorites was when she recreated Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” music video. She hung Cyrus on top of a bouncy ball from a tree and placed a fake tongue on Cyrus’s mouth, reenacting her famous tongue gesture.

“At our [Halloween] block party, I think we suggested to all the neighbors that we’d love to do skeletons up and down the street, and we’d be happy to do it for anyone who didn’t want to do it,” recalled Mehrez.

For years, Sawyer stored the skeletons in her basement. Since she’s moved, Christen Blum stores most of the skeletons. Blum is now one of the lead organizers of the famous tradition since Sawyer and Mehrez moved.

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“It’s really grown to be much more of a neighborhood effort. I do a lot of the coordinating, and you know, storing some stuff in my base,” said Blum. “But ultimately, I would say…more than half the homes are done by the people in the house, so it’s really a group effort.”

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The trio is thrilled the neighborhood has continued the tradition. Both Sawyer and Mehrez still visit the neighborhood during the Halloween season. Two weeks before Halloween, people from Belmont and other towns visit Hillcrest Road to see the skeleton displays and guess what each skeleton costume is referencing.

“I feel like it’s an outdoor museum for one week out of the year,” said visitor Sarah Ellison, one of the many who will haunt Hillcrest Avenue this Halloween.