Turn onto SE 43rd in Milwaukie, and your jaw drops at the sheer scale of a graveyard growing out of a suburban home’s yard. It’s as if reality shifted to reveal a burial site that predates Portland, with a towering gothic spire ominously watching over the final resting place of pop culture greats. Complete with a family mausoleum, a funeral carriage drawn by skeleton horses, a cryptkeeper, and a gigantic spider, the Davis Graveyard is a spectacle to behold.
Back in 1996, however, Chris and Jeff Davis simply wanted to break out of using store bought decorations. With the help of a few crafting books, early internet forums, and their window painting friend Scott Campbell (AKA Extremo The Clown), their first of eventually thirty Halloween displays attracting looky-loos and accolades would begin.
Looking at the level of absolute mastery in the execution of their graveyard, it’s surprising that neither of the Davises come from a creative career. While Jeff has some past experience from building theater sets in college, they both learned how to carve their own tombstones out of styrofoam thanks to books on making props. Eventually they’d make everything in these books, plus even more from early internet forums, including a trendy-at-the-time crank-operated ghost. It was in these forums that Chris and Jeff found what they call their Halloween family.
“I have friends all over the world. I’ve taught classes to them, we’ve visited them, and they are what keeps us going,” says Chris. Today, they continue to consider how their work will be received by their online family, especially this year as there’s growing antici…pation around how they will honor dearly departed Tim Curry and Dolly Parton.
In the beginning, they focused on tombstones with pop culture references, from mainstream names like Beetlejuice to niche characters like Lewis Vendredi, the main antagonist in the Friday the 13th TV series. When pop culture titan David Bowie passed, they chose to honor the man by draping his tombstone with a feathered cape. Along with the tombstone for Gene Wilder, which they consider one of the iconic classics of the graveyard, honoring these legends with a nod to their work has proved to be a cathartic way to celebrate their impact.
But in a balance between the comedic and the macabre, the setting beyond the tombstones carries a far more serious tone. The Davises have built out a crumbling chapel inspired by Scotland’s Ardgowan Castle, a crypt bearing the Davis name, and statues inspired by real-life works found in cemeteries like the Kiss of Death, all made out of styrofoam, cement, and gusto.
Looking at their work can equally inspire thoughts of “I want to do this!” and “How the hell do they do that?”. Thankfully, they’ve been in the business of teaching what they’ve learned since 2007, educating those bold enough to break out of ideation and get into creation. Chris explains how they started teaching, saying, “We really did it for two reasons. One, not a lot of people know how to make tombstones, and the other one was we saw an opportunity to curb the Home Depot decorations.” They taught at conventions across the United States for nearly twenty years and currently teach in person and online from Portland. Their efforts to educate have proven so effective, they used to joke that if anyone ever stole a tombstone, it would be easy to spot in someone else’s yard, but now, chances are it’s just one of their students’ work. You can also see their influence at other local haunts like the Carriageway Cemetery, whose creators have taken courses from the Davises.
For those considering crafting, whether for Halloween or in general, the Davises say, “Just do it.” They recommend either taking their online or in-person tombstone course, or simply looking into cheap and easy ways to get creative. Consider getting crepe cloth from Dollar Tree for better-for-the-animals outdoor spiderwebs (store-bought versions can be harmful to birds and other wildlife), or take Jeff’s advice and seek out crafting books like How to Haunt Your House by their local friends Lynne and Shawn Mitchell, or The Home Haunter’s Prop Building Handbook by Steven Hickman (plus his Terror Syndicate tutorials on YouTube). However you get into crafting, they know no matter the results, the Davises say it will always feel better than anything you can buy at the store—“because it will be you.”
Davis Graveyard, 8703 SE 43rd, Milwaukie. Full effects run Fridays and Saturdays until 11 pm, and Sundays until 10 pm, throughout October. Lights are visible weekdays until 10 pm. More information at davisgraveyard.com and on Instagram @davisgraveyard.