Stealing Halloween

Rachel Ufer has looked forward to Halloween on Granger Ave. ever since she moved there in 2017. “You can’t really believe it until you see it,” Ufer says of the spooky decorations that drew roughly 1,400 trick-or-treaters to her block in Burns Park last year. But a few days before Halloween, a large inflatable skeleton was stolen from her house—and the next night, an inflatable spider.

Afterward, her younger child, then seven years old, asked, “Are these men in our bushes? Are they going to come back? Do they want things inside the house?” This “truly affected my children’s ability to feel safe in their neighborhood,” Ufer says.

A neighbor, Carly Groves, went looking for the stolen items and spotted them at a nearby fraternity house. Ufer says she called the police, but they told her that when they investigated, the residents showed what they said were receipts for the items, so they did nothing.

Ufer went to see for herself. “My spider was on the top of the roof in broad daylight,” she says. The door was open, so she walked in and saw other inflatable decorations that she recognized as belonging to her neighbors.

When she confronted the fraternity’s president, Ufer says, he admitted that pledges often stole decorations even though he told them not to do it.

Faced with the prospect of another police investigation, she says, they eventually apologized. They returned the Ufers’ decorations and those they stole from her neighbors, and made a donation to the Burns Park PTO. But the thefts have been going on for years—and the neighbors see no end in sight.

O n a warm August evening, a group of neighbors gathered to discuss Granger’s allure: Groves, Groves’s mother Linda Lampman and stepfather Jim Smiley, Lynn Gessner, Aprille McKay, Nate Richardson, and Hiag and Ema Avsharian.

The neighbors agreed that the Richardson and Lampman/Smiley houses really turned things up a notch, Gessner says she counted 800 treat-or-treaters in 2016 and 1,400 last year. Many Granger households spend roughly $350 for candy each year.

Richardson, an electrician, moved to Granger in 2015 with his wife, Mara, and two children. At Halloween, he fills their front yard with elaborate decorations and spends twelve weeks creating a haunted house in the backyard where ten people in costumes scare those who walk through. Last year, it attracted 2,000 people.

Down the block, Smiley and Lampman buy 2,000-pound pumpkins from Harnica Farms in Dundee and have them carved into giant jack-o’-lanterns. Seven of their grandchildren in an upstairs window send full-sized candy bars down through a pipe to eager trick-or-treaters on the lawn—3,000 of them last year. 

Groves, who lives on Shadford, says their displays and generosity prompted “the whole neighborhood to join in.” They even get a permit to have Granger blocked off so the throngs can trick-or-treat safely. “The kids are so polite and grateful,” McKay says.

But in recent years, thefts have marred the experience. Richardson says they typically occur the two weekends before Halloween. Travis Martin, the U-M’s director of fraternity and sorority life, says he has confirmed that students are stealing decorations for their own Halloween parties.

After decorations were stolen from his haunted house, Richardson installed security cameras. They didn’t prevent another nighttime raid—an LED projector was taken from a second-floor balcony—but the next day, they let him reconstruct how it happened. 

At 2 a.m., his Nest doorbell had recorded a half-dozen students talking outside. “One of them said ‘I really like that light,’” Richardson says. “‘That’s really cool. I’m going to take it.’” A backyard camera caught one of the young men climbing a tree and jumping onto a balcony just outside where Richardson’s then-eight-year-old son was sleeping. Unable to detach the protector or the security camera from the mounting pole, he stole all three, and smashed the camera on the sidewalk.

Several years ago, the Avsharians had a life-sized foam French maid stolen—Hiag acknowledges it was perfect prey for students—and last year a butler figure was taken. Richardson says that almost all his decorations are tightly staked and tied down with wires, yet thieves still find ways to take them. “Now the whole neighborhood is getting hit,” he says.

Two weeks before Halloween in 2022, in the middle of the afternoon, Jenn Monk-Reising saw a white Jeep pull up at her home on Austin. Passengers got out and tried to grab several decorations. She had zip-tied everything together, but they got away with two tombstones she’d designed for a Young People’s Theater production of The Addams Family.

Their letter carrier took a photo of the car, including its license plate number, and gave it to her. Monk-Reising called the police who came over right away and took all the information. But she never heard back, even after Groves located the Jeep at a fraternity house. AAPD spokesperson Chris Page emails that an officer investigated but was unable to identify who stole the decorations.

Hiag Avsharian acknowledges that stolen Halloween decorations are a “first-world problem.” But taken together, Monk-Reising says, the thefts amount to “thousands of dollars.”

After students stole graveyard decorations from Sue Anne Bell’s yard about five years ago, she moved an eight-foot inflatable spider to her roof. The experience was “so frustrating and defeating,” Bell says. “Why does someone want to take the spirit of community and generosity that we all need so much right now and turn it into something negative?”

Like Ufer, Groves is disappointed with the police response. Even when neighbors have sent photos of unique decorations that disappeared from their house and then were displayed at fraternities, she says, “nothing is done.” Ufer says that officers suggested putting AirTags on her decorations to track them—“asking me to spend more money rather than stopping this from happening,” she says.

Page emails that the department does “increase patrols in neighborhoods once school begins and as we get closer to Halloween.” But many of the victims don’t want to prosecute, he writes, they just want the thefts to stop. So since 2022, the department’s community engagement unit has met with the U-M’s office of fraternity and sorority life each fall.

Libby Hill confronted some jack-o’-lantern thieves herself in 2021. Her husband was looking out a window at their house on Ferdon and saw college-age kids grab the pumpkins their three young children had carved. When one dropped his cell phone, she went out and grabbed it and saw a text chain related to pledging and rushing a fraternity.

When the phone rang, Hill answered and said that she would return the phone if they returned the pumpkins and apologized to her children. “I thought it was important to put a face to what these college kids were doing,” she says.

Hill woke her children to tell them what had happened. When the students got there, she says, “They were kind and apologetic.” They returned the pumpkins, apologized to the children, and asked what their favorite Halloween candy was.

The students dropped off the candy the next day. But since then, Hill says, her kids have posted a sign by their jack-o’-lanterns that says, “Please don’t steal these.”

In 2022, the Interfraternity Council began hosting a “Trunk or Treat,” handing out candy from the trunk of a car at the Burns Park Senior Center. But the goodwill was short-lived. “The day after that, someone came through and thirty things were stolen,” Richardson says. Martin Pl. resident Karen Healy, who got involved to help neighbors who had decorations stolen, figures that the students involved in Trunk or Treat were the “good kids,” while the “party boys” did the thefts.

Hiag Avsharian says he realizes that living so close to campus, there are bound to be occasional issues. But this isn’t a few drunk students occasionally stealing a couple of small items, Richardson says—it’s become an annual ritual. Avsharian believes that “something has to happen within the Greek system, like significant fines or probation” to stop it.

The IFC declined a request for an interview but said in an emailed statement that it has a “zero-tolerance policy towards theft of any kind. We are committed to fostering positive relationships with our neighbors and continuing to build trust through efforts such as our annual IFC-hosted Trunk or Treat initiative.”

Martin, at the U-M, says he was surprised when he first heard about the problem two years ago. “These actions don’t reflect the collective of the fraternity and sorority community and certainly go against our values,” he says. He says an investigation found that two members of Phi Delta Gamma (known as FIJI) were involved in stealing the decorations that Ufer found at the frat house. “If we find organizations are responsible for these kinds of matters, we always partner with international headquarters and student leaders” to get them resolved, he says. “We do have proactive measures in place and are planning to implement those this fall as well.”

In a letter to the fraternities last year, Martin warned that encouraging new members to violate the law is hazing, which is a violation of university policy and a criminal act “that will have far-reaching consequences.” He wrote that the AAPD will support prosecuting any individuals or fraternities involved “to the fullest extent of the law.”

But Healy says the neighbors “felt really let down” because Martin didn’t provide any detail on the internal investigation and there were no significant consequences: “It’s clear that most fraternities ignore anything that Martin says.”

Taking things into her own hands, Healy met in March with Erik Bro, a Burns Park resident who was a member of FIJI as a student at Berkeley; Jackson Vontz, the current FIJI chapter president; and Bob Pierce, a FIJI alum and alumni advisor who is director of major gifts at the U-M School of Engineering.

Bro says that as a parent and member of the community, he felt “sadness and anger” that college students—especially those in his former fraternity—would do this. He’s been hit himself—some orange Halloween lights were stolen last year—and is eager to put a stop to the thefts.

Pointing to the IFC’s refusal to be interviewed, Vontz also declined. However, in an email, he emphasizes that the chapter now has “a zero tolerance policy [and] will drop anyone that steals or harms the community at all.” He hopes that “community members can come to individual chapters during their meetings to further stress the importance of the history of what has happened and how to solve it.”

Bro says he was encouraged by a “productive conversation” he had last March with Pierce and is happy with FIJI’s new zero tolerance policy which would oust an offending member on the first offense. But he’s been disappointed by the general lack of follow-up from Vontz and Pierce. 

FIJI and other fraternities “can say all they want that they’ve told their members not to steal, but if there are no consequences, it’s likely to happen again,” he says. 

“I hope and wish [the fraternities] would take this more seriously and invite the community members in to help develop a plan” to address the thefts this Halloween, he continues. “So far, I haven’t seen that.”

Martin says that in August, he, assistant director Jordan Borchert, and Laura Blake Jones, the associate vice president and dean of students, met with the presidents, social chairs, risk managers, and new member educators of the IFC fraternities and Panhellenic Association sororities. They pointed out the seriousness of Greek members engaging in theft, he says, “and we believe that it was well received by the leaders.” Martin adds that organizations may be suspended if the thefts continue.

Even if current fraternity leaders succeed in curbing the thefts, Healy believes, the cycle could begin again once they graduate: “Nobody thinks it’s ever going to go away.” The result, she says, is that neighbors will get fed up and do less, which means less fun for kids on Halloween.

Ema Avsharian says she will no longer purchase expensive decorations; nor will Monk-Reising. “It’s totally disheartening to purchase them and even make them and have them stolen,” she says. Richardson says that this year, he’ll wait until closer to Halloween to put out his decorations and tie them down more securely.

Ufer hopes that the students can find a different way to celebrate. They “have to realize that their decisions are having a greater impact than they realize,” she says, “and we want it to stop.”