It's Halloween and this can only mean one thing - homes transformed into horror film sets in celebration of everything spooky.
This year the ECHO has already featured a Bootle woman who turned her home into a ghost ship for Halloween as part of a fundraising drive.
Lorna Smith will open her Hawthorne Road home to the public on the big night to raise money for a grieving family.
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While extraordinary Halloween displays have been the norm in the US for many years, the trend has crossed the water and caught on in a big way in the UK. Not content with just window dressing, the displays are becoming increasingly ambitious, with some featuring full on light shows and mind blowing animatronics.
In Britain, Halloween is traditionally influenced by Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic festival Samhain, which are believed to have pagan roots.
Here we take a look back at some of the most elaborate decorations seen outside family homes on previous Halloweens.
Damwood Road, Speke
In 2021, a home was transformed into a "house of horror" for just £2 to raise money for a much-loved grandad.
James Boyle, 34, had moved to the area around six months ago with his wife, Sarah, and six children.
The joiner was creating Halloween props in his front garden on Damwood Road for an Alzheimer's charity when people started coming by the house saying they were looking forward to his spooky display.
The dad-of-six said: "When people started saying they couldn't wait to see what the garden looked like at Christmas, at first I was thinking 'no', but then I started collecting some wood.
"I'll just be driving along and see a skip and I'm out the car and just get in there. I'm all about up-cycling so I'll grab anything I can find and use it.
"The kids now say they don't like me taking them to school because they know I'll just end up in a skip. It's like a joiner's shop on wheels."
Once James began making decorations for outside his home, he said he "couldn't stop".
The garden now consists of a spooky guillotine, coffins, around a dozen scary figures and much more.
He's only spent £2 on the decorations, which was for new paint brushes and batteries.
Domingo Grove, Anfield
A Liverpool mum transformed her home into a ghoulish house of horror to raise money for Alder Hey.
Katie Griffiths, 24, first gave the front of her home a festive horror theme in 2020 while Liverpool was still in a Tier 3 lockdown.
The following year, the house of horror was back and even bigger, taking up two of Katie's neighbour's gardens in Domingo Grove, Anfield.
The home really comes alive, for want of a better word, at night as the vampires, skeletons and other macabre characters animate while screams fill the air.
All this happens as terrifying characters appear at the bedroom windows of the home, from killer clowns to the shadowy figure of a desperate person trapped inside, banging on the windows for help.
Wesley Braithwaite, 28, is the dad of Katie's two children and made all the props himself.
He told the ECHO: "The cemetery sign and the archway is all built out of heavy duty insulation you use on the outside of buildings. It's all cut and melted then I paint them.
"The hangman is made out of PVC piping and has a window wiper motor inside to make him move.
"The stocks are made out of scrap wood I found in a skip and then knocked that together. I'll just use anything really, anything I can get my hands on."
East Lancs Road, Norris Green
Hidden in plain sight on East Lancashire Road, Danielle Lawless' home transforms into a house of horrors each Halloween to help her daughters celebrate the spooky holiday.
Over the past decade, she has filled her garden with the scariest items possible including a zombie coming out of the ground, a scary coffin, and Danielle's favourite - her terrifying clown.
There's even a witch flying away on her broom near the upstairs windows.
While Halloween would no doubt be different for many during last year's lockdowns, Danielle said she decided to keep things as normal as possible for her daughters, Elesha and Ruby. Even the coronavirus pandemic didn't stop her from keeping up the family tradition.
Townsend Avenue, Norris Green
One man who upped the scare-factor in 2017 was Scott Kelley, who gave his nan's house on Townsend Avenue a terrifying makeover.
Scott Kelley, 25, from Norris Green said the tradition stretched back some years.
He said: "My nan used to do the house up every year for all the grandchildren, I remember it starting from when I was 10 years old.
"As I grew up, I took it up myself because I loved it so much and now we do it every year."
Over time, Scott has spent hundreds of pounds on decorations and previously Scott told the ECHO he was saving up to buy a £1,000 flying witch. The high-tech decorations included a window projector display which creates spooky shadows.
Outer Forum, Norris Green
In 2016, homeowner Mary Flynn, 49, turned her property in Outer Forum, Norris Green, into a house of horrors for the third year running to mark the spookiest night of the year.
Her Halloween obsession began with a single toy ghost that clings to the living room window, but now consists of dozens of scary life-size dolls, gravestones, masks and pumpkins.
Mary, a grandma of three, said: "We spent three days getting everything ready. Each year we bring it all down from the loft. We've got millions of bin bags full of Halloween stuff.
"I bought one ghost a few years back and it just escalated from there."
The family planned to mark Halloween with a party and Mary's home has become an attraction in Norris Green as hundreds of parents swing by with their children in the run up to October 31.
Mary, who has lived in the house for over a decade, said: "The neighbours never complain, they have been great.
"Lots of parents bring their children past every year and they are really excited to see it all.
"On the night itself we will get hundreds of people stopping by, all my family will be round and we'll make a big pan of scouse and chicken curry."
Upton Green, Speke
In 2014, Mum-of-three Hayley Williams transformed her Speke home into a terrifying "house of horrors."
With the help of family and friends, Hayley, 29, worked tirelessly for a month to decorate the house, in Upton Green, and even invited local children to take a tour - if they dared.
The petrifying props on display included an "electric chair," stocks and a grisly guillotine.
The front garden was full of ghoulish ghosts, spooky skeletons, wicked witches and terrifying tombstones. But the fun didn't stop there as inside was just as frightful.
Hayley said: "It hasn't cost me much as I've been buying decorations for years and we've made the bigger things from scrap wood and materials that have been donated."
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