For Halloween this year, I put all of the piles of Spanish moss we have in our yard to good use and built an 8-foot-tall moss monster complete with glowing red eyes. I set him at the end of the driveway to taunt passersby.

The first step was just gathering as much moss as possible around the yard. Living on a well-treed lot in Northeast Florida, we have more than enough. From there I hammered together an armature of scrap wood and attached it to a sturdy base in the shape of an “H.”

Once I had a simple skeleton ready, I put clumps of moss on it and held it all in place with fishing line. I wasn’t sure what to do about a face, so I squashed a plastic plant pot to give him a mouth, and then removed all but 2 bulbs from a strand of Christmas lights to give him glowing red eyes. The last step was just to hide the H-shaped stand with some grass and plants.

The idea came from a similar moss monster I saw at Goldhead Branch State Park shown on the left. I loved the idea when I first saw it, but I thought it looked too stodgy. His arms and legs were just too straight, so when I made mine I tried to stagger the legs and give the sense of knee and elbow joints.