A Pennsylvania homeowner is refusing to remove Halloween decorations depicting bagged bodies hanging from trees outside his Bristol Borough property despite demands from local civil rights leaders.
The display, which features phony corpses wrapped in bags suspended from a tree, has drawn fierce criticism from the Bucks County NAACP and some residents who say the imagery evokes the racist lynchings that terrorized Black Americans throughout the 20th century. The homeowner, who has not been publicly identified, purchased the items as part of a decorative kit online and maintains he never intended to offend anyone, according to his statements to NBC 10 Philadelphia.
Roshea Newkirk, a local resident, was among those who found the decorations deeply disturbing. “I’m just looking at it and I’m just thinking to him, like, ‘do you not see what’s wrong with this?'” she said to the outlet.
The Bucks County NAACP issued a formal call for removal, posting a statement to Facebook that drew a sharp line between creative expression and historical trauma. “This is not about restricting Halloween celebrations or freedom of expression. It is about historical awareness, empathy, and respect for our neighbors,” the civil rights chapter wrote.
The organization emphasized that imagery of bodies hanging from trees “carries a painful historical significance” for Black Americans, connecting the seasonal display to a brutal legacy of extrajudicial killings.
Not all neighbors share the NAACP’s outrage. Mike Wade, another local resident, defended the display as standard Halloween fare after his initial surprise wore off. “At first I looked at it, and it’s a little bit different. Like, but then I’m looking, it’s Halloween,” he told the outlet.
Wade doubled down on his support by comparing the hanging decorations to his own annual approach to the holiday. “My house is scary. My house is always scary. It’s always set up scary. Same thing. Dead bodies laying around, skeletons. It’s Halloween,” he said.
The disagreement spilled into formal government channels when debate over the decorations reached a borough council meeting. Officials there confirmed they had contacted the homeowner in an effort to persuade him to take down the display, but their intervention failed.
“He feels they’re Halloween decorations and he won’t take them down. And we don’t have an ordinance against anything like that,” an official said at the meeting, highlighting the limited tools available to local government when private expression on residential property divides a community.
The standoff leaves Bristol Borough with no clear legal path to force removal, as the municipality lacks any ordinance specifically prohibiting such displays. The decorations remained in place as of Saturday, according to the outlet’s reporting, with the homeowner holding firm behind his interpretation of Halloween tradition.
The incident adds to a recurring pattern of seasonal decoration disputes across the United States, where homeowners pushing for ever-more-elaborate haunted aesthetics sometimes collide with neighbors who see echoes of real historical violence in the imagery chosen. Lynching comparisons have surfaced in previous years over similar hanging-figure displays, typically resulting in the same tension between property rights, local speech norms, and calls for racial sensitivity.
