Five figures wrapped in black plastic hang from a tree outside a home in Bristol Borough, Pennsylvania, and the owner says they are staying up through Halloween. The Bucks County NAACP asked him to take them down. Borough officials say no law lets them make him.
The display, which the homeowner told NBC10 off camera he bought as an online kit, has a small graveyard, two monster scarecrows, five mannequins hanging from a large tree and a sixth lashed to its trunk, all taped up like bodies. The homeowner has not been named publicly.
The NAACP chapter said it received a complaint on Oct. 7. In a statement it said the imagery “carries a painful historical significance rooted in lynching and racial terror.” It added: “While we recognize that Halloween decorations are often intended to frighten or shock, intent does not erase impact.” And: “Something can be legally permissible and still be profoundly harmful.”
Neighbor Karla Scott raised it at the Oct. 12 borough council meeting. “It is very offensive, not just to the Black people in the community, but the community as a whole,” she said, and her mind “went back to what my ancestors went through being hung from trees.” Resident Roshea Newkirk asked: “Do you not see what’s wrong with this?”
Council President Ralph DiGuiseppe told the Philadelphia Inquirer the borough acted fast: “We did address this immediately. I don’t think it was up there a few hours, and our borough inspector was there the next day.” The inspector found nothing to enforce. “He feels they’re Halloween decorations and he won’t take them down,” DiGuiseppe said. “We don’t have an ordinance against anything like that.” Another resident, Mike Wade, said: “It’s Halloween. My house is scary.”
Reason magazine, which defended the homeowner, reported that the mayor described him as a caring person with no sign of prejudice. It argued that the inspector’s visit and the council’s attention amounted to government pressure on protected expression, and noted that an ordinance banning “offensive” displays would be hard to square with the First Amendment.
The history behind the objection is documented. The Equal Justice Initiative has recorded more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings of Black people in the United States between Reconstruction and World War II. Congress took until March 29, 2022 to pass a federal anti-lynching law, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which covers conspiracies to commit a hate crime that result in death or serious bodily injury. It does not address yard displays.
The law that does reach hanging imagery asks about threat, not taste. Virginia made displaying a noose with intent to intimidate a felony in 2009, modeled on the cross-burning statute the Supreme Court upheld in Virginia v. Black in 2003. In 2016 the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of Jack Eugene Turner of Rocky Mount, who put a black-faced dummy with a noose in his yard next to his Black neighbors on the day nine Black worshippers were killed in Charleston. The court said the First Amendment “protects Turner’s right to be a racist” but does not permit him to “threaten or intimidate others.”
Bristol is not the first Halloween case. In Chesapeake, Virginia, in 2019, a neighbor, Lori Brunson, called police about figures in black trash bags hanging in a tree. “It is not funny, and it hurts. This is 2019,” she said. The homeowner said they were trash bags stuffed with paper, hung heads down so no one would read them as lynching. Police called the display insensitive and talked to him, and it came down. In Leadville, Colorado, in 2015, sheriff’s deputies removed a mannequin hanging from a street light after residents complained online. In Kelowna, British Columbia, in 2021, the RCMP opened an investigation into a hanging effigy displayed beside a Confederate flag, and Mayor Colin Basran said there was “no place in Kelowna for this kind of racist imagery.” The effigy had been removed by the time bylaw officers arrived.
What separates Bristol is the absence of any such signal: no flag, no noose, no message, and a homeowner who says there was no intent. The NAACP’s position is that for Black residents the image lands the same either way. The borough’s is that it cannot legislate that. Halloween is Saturday.
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