It's time to dig up the origin story of Home Depot's 12-foot Giant Skeleton

Vice looked into the birth of everyone's favorite oversized Halloween lawn ornament

By Reid McCarter  |  October 28, 2022 | 3:55pm
Aux Features Skeleton
It's time to dig up the origin story of Home Depot's 12-foot Giant Skeleton
A promotional image that leaves you with no doubt that this is, indeed, a 12-foot Giant Skeleton With LifeEyes™. Screenshot: The Home Depot

In the dark days of 2020, the world was given one bright light to help us make it to the end of the year: A big prop skeleton that crawled forth from the witch-tended basements of Home Depot to save Halloween. In the months since then, “Home Accents Holiday 12 ft. Giant-Sized Skeleton With LifeEyes™-5124738" has become an icon. The bony giant helps ring in other holidays, now sells out every autumn, and, by being much larger than a normal Halloween skeleton, has firmly established itself as a seasonal celebrity.

Naturally, then, we’ve been curious how Home Depot ended up exhuming such a popular skeleton, creating a holiday legend in the process. And, luckily, Vice’s Addy Baird has delved deep into the lair of the necromancers responsible for birthing the enormous prop and interviewed them in order to retrieve just this tale.

Senior merchant of decorative holiday items Lance Allen says that his team got together in 2019 with a desire to create something that was “larger than life” and was struck by a haunted house trade show that featured “the waist-up of a skeleton coming out of the ground.” He continues, revealing the appropriately free-form creative process that led to Home Depot settling on the size of the eventual skeleton they’d make.

“At one time, it was like, ‘Ah, a 10-foot would be huge. That’d be empowering. Everybody would like 10 feet!’” Allen recalls. “And then it’s like, Let’s just press everything, no limits! Let’s go higher than everybody thought was possible.”

After convincing senior product engineer Rachel Little that a 12-foot skeleton was possible, the creation went through “probably an eight-, nine-month development” regarding its design and price point. Eventually, the price was decided and the big bony boy was dubbed “Skelly” by its makers.

Allen immediately recognized that his team had conjured up “the greatest Halloween item ever created” but was nervous about launching it online during the first pandemic summer. Thankfully, he says, “as fast as stores could put them up, people were buying them. They were buying the displays right off the floor and taking them home.”

The reason? As Allen says: “Nobody had ever seen a 12-foot skeleton ….”

To make better sense of the craze, Vice also spoke to Nine Inch Nails’ former art director Rob Sheridan about his love for the giant skeleton, which provides an outside view of the 12-foot craze. Sheridan remembers being unable to grab one from the 2020 inventory, experiencing “serious FOMO” after missing a 2021 presale, and then waking up “at like 5:30 in the morning” the same year for an opportunity to buy one that year alongside “a gaggle of other giant skeleton weirdos.”

He celebrated its arrival at its home with proper aplomb, sharing a photo of the skeleton receiving the level of worship it deserves and quoting Nine Inch Nails in the process.

Through Sheridan’s tweet, we see the end result of the Home Depot team’s hard work. Having dared to imagine a skeleton that’s very, very big, Skelly was born and became a new Halloween favorite. And, when brought to the home of diligent owners, it receives the reverence due to a true 21st-century icon.

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