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What She Cooks Up in Her Mind Is Far Scarier Than What She Does in the Lab

They came to her from out of the blue, smashing their saucer in her front yard, snatching children from the driveway as hazardous waste barrels burst open and grew a dozen eyes. The alien containment chamber shattered, releasing an unseen terror on Troy in Fluvanna County.

Meanwhile, aliens stalked her yard while the military organized a response and rushed to the scene.

Welcome to the mind and front yard of University of Virginia researcher Garnett Mingledorff.

“That’s a scary place to be,” Mingledorff laughed, standing next to the saucer hovering over the driveway, where an abducted child was hanging by a mean, green tractor beam. “We choose a new theme every year, and this happened to be one of the themes that we hadn’t done yet.”

The Mingledorffs building a crashed UFO out of wood and styrofoam.

Using recycled Styrofoam packing and other materials, the Mingledorffs cobble together spooky spectaculars that leave the neighbors guessing every year. This year, they built two spaceships and crashed one into their yard.

By day, Mingledorff is a mild-mannered researcher in the biology laboratory of George Bloom, a UVA professor studying Alzheimer’s disease. But when evening falls and Halloween approaches, she becomes a diabolical designer.

“I love that the neighbors’ kids and the neighbors are excited about it. They’re asking, ‘What are you doing this year? What are you doing next year?’” she said as neighbor kids rode by on bikes and shouted approval.

Mingledorff and her husband Jason have been decorating their home on Indigo Lane in Troy for years, but not with a skeleton here or a werewolf there. There’s always a visual story being told.

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“In 2018, we did spiders. A giant spider was coming down a web behind a skeletal exterminator with a poison sprayer who didn’t know that a whole arachnid army was behind him,” she recalled, showing off photos of the display from her phone.

Then came the pandemic. With everyone cooped up, she invented a haunting circus, replete with games like “Dead Ringer,” where kids threw rings over dismembered zombie hands, and “Eye on the Prize,” where kids tossed eyeballs into cups.

“Everybody wore their masks and we were all outside, and it was something that we could do for fun,” she recalled. “It gave us something that we could do to get with neighbors and have a good time.”

The entrance to the evil carnival themed yard full of lights and signs.

Not one to revisit too many themes, last year Garnett Mingledorff revisited 2020’s circus motif, creating “CarnEvil,” complete with a ghastly carousel that slowly turned and turned.

How does Mingledorff come up with her designs? Let’s consider the pirate ship idea suggested by her husband.

“I thought, ‘If we’re doing pirates, we need a pirate ship. But we’re not building an entire pirate ship, so it has to be wrecked. But doing just the front of the ship seems (lazy), so you want to do the back half, too. Of course, the back half has to have a mast and the mast has to have a crow’s nest,’” she recalled. “So now, how did the ship go down? Why, a giant kraken, of course.”

Although the ship has long since vanished, much of it returned from space. From skeletons to Styrofoam to eyeballs, most materials in the displays are repurposed and reused.

“Styrofoam is a beautiful thing. You can do a lot with it. I’m reusing a lot of things from previous years. The Styrofoam that’s on the top of the spaceship this year was the deck of the pirate ship,” she said. “And these aliens are skeletons in alien clothes. They make great human-size models.”

A sinking pirates ship in Garnett Mingledorff’s with kracken tenticles reaching up from the ground and around the ship.

A kraken devoured the pirate ship sailing in the Mingledorffs’ front yard in 2022, requiring them to build a mast with a sail and a crow’s nest, wriggling tentacles and skeletal sailors about to meet their watery doom.

As they put the final touches on this year’s alien invasion, including a skeleton in a tinfoil hat at the driveway’s edge, Mingledorff is already formulating and concocting next year’s display, but she won’t say what it may be.

“That’s a secret. They were trying to guess this year, and somebody guessed aliens, so we had to throw them off by putting out random things in the yard,” she laughed. “We put out zombies, a big Styrofoam alligator that I made when we did the voodoo bayou and laser swamp.

“We’ll just have to wait and see.”

To see what awaits trick-or-treaters this Halloween, here are some more photos of the alien invasion and the work that went into it along with proof of past hauntings, including 2020’s haunted circus, 2021’s voodoo bayou, 2022’s pirate ship and 2023’s CarnEvil.