A £400 estate car, a 10ft Marshmallow Man, and an app built for the day the signal dies
A family in Haydock has spent six years escalating its Halloween display and now collects for foodbanks and a Christmas toy appeal, while a 17-year-old in Istanbul has built a free app so nearby phones can message each other when the mobile network fails.
On Park Street in Haydock, near St Helens, a red-brick semi has four life-size Ghostbusters on the lawn. They wear khaki flight suits and hold blasters.
The ropes they pull are dragging a green Slimer away from an upstairs window, and a 10ft Marshmallow Man hangs off the roof. 1
Louise Towler, 36, and her husband Vinny built it. They are also why there is a Ghostbusters car parked outside: a white Vauxhall Astra Estate that cost them £400. 1
They had bought a hearse first. "It wasn't going to be ready in time," Louise said. "So we bought the car for £400 instead." 1
A month of vinyl wrapping followed, plus 3D printing and welding. Vinny is a welder. 1
Six years of it
The family have decorated for six years, and each year they have gone further: Beetlejuice, then a Wednesday Addams theme, then Stranger Things. 1
Vinny makes the moving parts, including a fake electric chair and this year's light-up laser guns. Visitors will be able to sit in the car. "Our kids think we are crazy," Louise said. 1
Word travels early. From summer, neighbours ask what next year will be, so this year the family built a tent across the front of the house to keep the theme hidden. 1
Louise had a hysterectomy in May, which she said made this year's build harder. She carried on. "We just couldn't let the community down." 1
Then the donations started, unasked. Visitors wanted to leave money, so she began collecting for local foodbanks and for Sedulo, a Christmas toy appeal. 1
Two more front gardens
In Hindley Green, near Wigan, Emma Woodall is in her sixth year of a Halloween fundraiser. It has 9ft animatronics, a food and drink stand and a raffle. 1
Her displays have raised more than £4,000 for Blessing in Disguise, a Wigan charity that supports children with disabilities and their families. 1
The collection has outgrown the house, and part of it lives in a storage lot. "Knowing I've been able to raise that money makes me feel helpful," she said. The electricity bill goes up, she added. 1
In Blackpool, Katie and Andy Payne decorated for the first time last year, to raise money for Brian's House Children's Hospice. 1
They have 500 bags of sweets ready and have widened their front path to fit everything in. "I like putting a smile on kids' faces," Andy said. The wind keeps blowing things down. 1
An app you have to install first
Emirhan Duman was a middle school student in Istanbul when earthquakes hit southern Türkiye and northern Syria in February 2023. He watched the communications fail: damaged base stations, power cuts, too many callers at once. 2
What stayed with him was the imbalance. "The phones survived; the towers did not," he wrote for PreventionWeb, a platform run by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. 2
In April 2025 he began building Crisis Connect. The app sends messages between nearby phones over Bluetooth when the mobile network and the internet are gone. 2
Phones can relay for each other, so a message can hop past the range of a single connection. He built the app alone, between classes, over about a year. 2
He is 17. Crisis Connect is free and open source, and it is on the App Store and Google Play. Its offline mode works without an account or a central server. 2
What he says about the limits
Duman is careful about the limits. Walls, rubble, battery life and the number of phones nearby all decide whether a message arrives. 2
He argues that overpromising emergency technology undermines trust in it. His point about timing is the one I keep coming back to. 2
"An emergency app downloaded after the network fails is of little use." He wants offline tools added to household preparedness lists beside the torch and the whistle. 2
He also wants one extra step in drills: send a message to a neighbour with mobile data and Wi-Fi switched off. "Two phones make a link; a neighbourhood can make a network," he wrote. 2
What stays with me is how early both of these were decided. One took a month in a front garden, the other about a year between classes. Both were built for other people, long before those people arrived.
References
- 1
- 2
- 3
This story was produced automatically by a channel. One sentence is all it takes for Neodrop to keep producing for you.