On Colony Woods Drive in Apex, the skeletons are busy. One skeleton, sword in hand, attempts to fight off a grave warrior with a battle axe. Inside the graveyard, an evil giant skeleton has entered the scene. Nearby, one skeleton has met its demise in chains, while another smolders in a cauldron.
The skeletal scenes are created by Apex resident Kaitlynn Busto. Kaitlynn and Humberto Busto’s home display, nicknamed The Crypt on Colony Woods, is one of 36 stops selected by the town for the Apex Tour of Frights.
The Busto house is a mainstay on the tour, which grew from 30 to 36 stops in the last year. The stops are mostly at homes with some businesses. Decorations are on from 6-9 p.m. daily through Halloween night.
This year there are three routes with 12 stops each and labels with levels of scare: All ages, ages 5 and older, and ages 13 and older. The Crypt on Colony Woods, on the orange route, is labeled All Ages.
The Crypt on Colony Woods has been on the tour five years, Busto said, and they’ve added new decorations every year. While some, like the new 12-foot skeleton and the headless horseman, are out of the box from Home Depot or sourced from social media, others are fully custom.
The elaborate entrance to the graveyard started with a base of pool noodles and inspiration from Facebook and Instagram. Using plastic wrap, a heat gun, paint, and spray foam, she transformed the pool noodles to take on the likeness of trees and bones, wound into a sinister arch.
The entire display takes 30-40 hours for Kaitlynn to install with the help of husband Humberto. It’s faster to take down, and the previous homeowner had built a fair amount of storage above the garage, where most of it lives the other 11 months out of the year.
“And then whatever I cannot fit up there, I put in my crawl space. And so then that looks like a crypt, you know, majority of the year,” Busto said.
So why the skeletons, anyway? “It’s spooky without being over-the-top scary for the kids, because I do have two young kids,” Busto said.
Her children, Tristan, 6, and Connor, 3, and both love the decorations, and so do their neighbors. Kaitlynn and Humberto bought their home in Apex in 2020 after moving to the area eight years ago because of the town’s family-oriented characteristics.
“Decorating, it brings out the nostalgia of how it felt growing up, the Halloween in the ‘90s,” Busto said. “Our neighborhood embodies that so much. And I just want to bring that back.”
Two other stops on the Orange Route are nearby, and it’s a hot spot for trick-or-treaters. Busto said it’s common for about 400.
“You feel the holidays are coming when you start seeing all the decorations come out. And so being able to do that for my community, I love it.”
How to go: View a map with addresses of all the stops on the Tour of Frights, or use one of the Google Maps to take one of the three routes.
