September 4, 2026
By Wendy Carlson
Photographs by Rana Faure
When I first met Jennifer Bastiaanse at her 1790 colonial house in Litchfield last June, she was wearing a cotton floral dress and a pink work apron. Her front lawn was an explosion of pastel flowers and lacy ferns. So it was hard to imagine her a few months later dressed all in black, her yard transformed into a mashup of Tim Burton and Martha Stewart styles. “I’m obsessed, I mean super obsessed with Halloween,” says Bastiaanse. When she and her husband, Paul, first moved to Litchfield six years ago, they decided to go all out decorating their South Lake Street house and barn. They installed tasteful lighting, arranged pumpkins and gourds along the walkway, and draped dried corn stalks and vines over the garden arbor, all in a nod to Martha Stewart. Then they added gravestones, ghouls, ghosts, giant spiders, witches’ hats, black cats, and dozens of grinning Tim Burton like skeletons. Those bony guys stumbled over from St. Anthony’s Cemetery next door, she tells me, jokingly. The decorating process takes place several days before Halloween, although planning begins months ahead. Just installing the large black stripes (scaffolding from Paul’s historic restoration business) that ran down the house last year was an eight-hour ordeal.
“I’m classic Halloween,” says Bastiaanse. She picks her costumes from her slew of vintage Victorian dresses, and her props are sourced from antique shops and retail stores. In the hay loft, a vintage chandelier illuminates a dangling skeleton. An old ladder holds old glass bottles and Mason jars filled with slimy ping-pong balls (eyeballs). Over the years, decorations on the house facade have changed from a plethora of witch hats to giant spiders to black cats to broad black stripes. “Halloween is so playful and exciting. It’s a lot like Christmas… but scarier,” she says. The joy it brings to people of all ages inspired her in 2024 to collect donations of Halloween decorations, toys, costumes, and activities and send them to flood victims of Hurricane Helene.
This fascination with the macabre is more than an annual obsession for Bastiaanse. On vacations, she seeks out haunted tours, and on weekends she watches horror movies, just not the gruesome ones. Think Beetlejuice and House on Haunted Hill. And her house, the former homestead of Tapping Reeve, has its own ghost—that of a previous owner.
“He is lighthearted and kind,” says Bastiaanse. She recalled the time she and her husband were cutting up potatoes and the heavy bag of potatoes rolled on its own to the end of the kitchen table. “My husband and I just looked at each other and went back to cutting potatoes,” she says with a shrug.
Come October 31, up to 100 trick-or-treaters may visit her house. It has also become a drive-by destination and a favorite view for children riding on the school bus. Aside from skeletons, spiders, ghouls, ghosts, and all those pumpkins and gourds, the place comes to life with Halloween music, creepy sounds, and a smoke machine that will send shivers down your spine.
