Williamson is Queen of Halloween
Staff writer
Trisha Williamson of Hillsboro usually celebrates her birthday a day early. Born on Nov. 1, she’s had a lifelong infatuation with the Halloween season.
Her home is both a time capsule and a canvas to be painted with decorations. Above her kitchen entrance, a sign reads “Wicked Witch.” Another sign, by her television, proclaims her the
“Queen of Halloween.”
More than orange and black regalia or carved Jack-O-Lanterns, Williamson appreciates the larger tone of fall’s spookiest day. Funeral baskets line the wall of her living room, candelabras adorn her tables, and her large Gothic bird cages are home to objects of their owner’s affection, none of which are avian creatures.
The dreary tone of her decorations makes for a stark contrast with the sheer joy Williamson exudes when talking about her collection.
Williamson said she and her husband, Bob, are involved with the American Legion, and will be helping put on a haunted house on Halloween for Trick or Treat Street in Peabody. They were married 10 or 11 years ago on Halloween. She can’t remember exactly which year, but there’s no question on which day for either of them.
“This way he doesn’t forget our anniversary or my birthday,” Williamson said.
Their small house is covered from the living room to the kitchen to the bathroom with Halloween trinkets and decorations, from Gothic crucifixes to witch hats to a giant spider. While she spices it up in season, she said her house maintains a Halloween touch year-round.
At Winfield, Kansas, where she went to college for theater, her professors had a house in which every room was themed. She was inspired by the idea, though her rooms don’t have different themes so much as variations on one theme.
Williamson, who lives on Washington St. in Hillsboro, said she was pleased with how the rest of the block is gearing up for Halloween.
“People usually think we’re just crazy,” she said. “But now I’m happy to see that the rest of the block is starting to put things up.”
Outside her home, Williamson has set up a pumpkin display — but not a traditional Jack-O-Lantern one. There’s pumpkins of different kinds, green ones, white ones, squat ones, warty ones.
“I had a friend come over and I said, ‘Ricky, what do you think of my pumpkins?’ He said ‘Well I’m trying to find one that looks like a pumpkin, Trisha,’” she recounted. “So even the pumpkins, I pick the odd ones.”
Halloween is the freakiest time of the year, and that gives Williamson the most inner peace. She likes Halloween’s mystical characteristics as well, such as fortune telling and palm reading.
“I like just knowing that something else is out there, and being able to feel it, and if a person lets themselves, they can be open to anything in the universe,” she said, pausing.
“Maybe I was a witch in a past life. A mummy or something.”
Last modified Oct. 23, 2014