One of the most popular Halloween decorations in recent years has been The Home Depot‘s giant 12-Foot skeleton. The towering mass of bones has been so successful, the chain has been selling them as early as July, and they still sell out. It’s not uncommon to see people resort to unscrupulous means to acquire popular items. One thing you may not expect though is for someone to outright steal one of the skeletons from another person’s yard in the middle of the day.
On October 15th, an unidentified person drove their white SUV alongside the curb outside a person’s home. The homeowner, who was not identified, had a Ring camera set up outside their house, and recorded what happened next. The driver of the vehicle gets out and starts looking at the skeleton decoration, which was weighted down with a heavy slab at its base. The person sees the slab, removes it, and starts moving the skeleton towards their vehicle.
What happens next seems like an exercise in futility as the thief starts trying to put the obviously too-large skeleton into the back of the SUV. In doing so, one of the arms falls off, but they still continue to try and push it further into the vehicle. Regrettably, the footage of the incident cuts off while the thief still has more than half the decoration hanging out the back of their vehicle. Fox 7 Austin does have pictures on their website showing the skeleton more manageably in the vehicle, as if the thief was able to fold it somehow? Or maybe they managed to disassemble it partly?
As noted by the victim’s neighbor, the area the houses are situated in has only one way in and out. The picture seems to confirm this, as the street looks like it ends in a cul-de-sac. That fact alone, combined with how the video ends, leaves so many unanswered questions that it’s kind of hard to know where to start with things. If it’s a self-contained neighborhood at the reported time of 4:45 PM, how did no one see it? The amount of risk involved with the theft makes it one of the more brazenly stupid criminal acts one could think of and yet somehow, they are still at large.
This isn’t the first time one of these decorations have been stolen. We found other incidents of bone theft as well.
Here’s another theft, this time from 2020, also at night, seemingly on foot.
Let this be a sad warning to the owners of giant skeleton decorations. Believe it or not, these things can be stolen. Make sure you weigh yours down properly or have some kind of surveillance on it, because these things can vanish on you in surprisingly quick fashion. Who would’ve thought that it wasn’t the “Spooky Scary Skeletons” you had to watch out for, but the Tricky Tenacious Thieves?!
