In the crisp October air, cars lined Bocage Boulevard as onlookers walked beneath the live oaks’ dappled shade. Neighbors sat in golf carts, mouths agape, staring at the over-the-top Halloween spectacle Rebecca Rathbone Harrod had created in her Baton Rouge front yard.

Meanwhile, Harrod sat on her bedroom floor, blissfully painting red flowers on a $1 brown suit she bought at a thrift store for Ludacris (Luda-crypt). Her mother, Michele Rathbone, sat nearby, hot-glueing braids to a skull that would soon belong to Snoop Dogg.

For years, Harrod, a Baton Rouge mother of six, told friends she wanted to create a celebrity graveyard. In previous years, she decorated her yard with skeletons for Halloween but never did it up big.

On Oct. 1, when a friend told her, “If you’re going to do it up b

See Full Page