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Halloween fanatics are dying to get their hands on this ghoulish garnish.
Home Depot’s towering 12-foot-tall skeleton with glowing eyes is the most sought-after spooky decor item of the season so far. The $300 piece is so in-demand that it quickly sold out online, and resale prices on eBay and Amazon have soared to more than $1,300.
The bony beast caught the eye of Avon by the Sea, NJ, resident Tom Laing, who first spotted it on horror blogs back in July.
“I’ve seen 6-foot skeletons, I’ve seen witches ... great, another pumpkin,” Laing, a 40-year-old real-estate agent, told The Post. But the nutty numbskull stole his heart. “It’s absurd, it’s gigantic and I’m in.”
In early September, he drove 3 miles to the nearest Home Depot and snapped it up for its original price, but not everyone has it so easy.
After admiring it in her local store near Hudson, Fla., Karen Governale, 42, tried to order one online and found it was sold out. So she frantically called the store to see if they still had the one she’d seen, to no avail. “I begged them,” said Governale, an office manager and artist. “But they said they are not allowed to sell the display model.”
Not to be deterred, she kept obsessively checking availability online. Her efforts paid off: A week later, she learned that a store in Tampa had one in stock. She drove 45 minutes south the next day to grab the skeleton, which comes in a cumbersome 4-by-5-foot box that luckily fit in her SUV with the seats folded down.
Laing set his up in his front yard, near spider web decorations in his bushes, gravestones in the flower beds and ghosts hanging from tree branches.
But he had a tough time getting the towering bag of bones to stand tall.
“I’m 5-foot-6, and the thing is twice my size,” he said, adding he needed to enlist his 31-year-old girlfriend Katrina Bethke, whose 4-foot-11 frame put the bulk of the installation out of her reach. “Trying to tilt it up, that was the only downside.”
Governale, with the help of her boyfriend, her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend, had hers up in 25 minutes, surrounded by a number of vibrant “Beetlejuice”-themed decorations.
She hoped that the presence of the spooky spectacle would lift the spirits of passersby. But not everyone is thrilled.
When she returned from work on Thursday, Governale heard a toddler cry out.
“All I heard was a little girl screaming, ‘I’m scared! I’m scared!’” said Governale. “The mother had to pick her up and carry her. I was trying not to laugh.”
Despite the reaction, Governale said you’ll have to pry the coveted creature from her cold, dead hands.
After all, the skeleton is now officially sold out for the remainder of this Halloween season, according to Home Depot.
“I purposely set it up right in front of my security camera so I can keep my eye on it,” she said.
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