A man was told to remove his Halloween display after neighbors called the police on him.
Daniel Abbie from Adelaide, Australia, was about to bring on the festive mood outside his home in McLaren Vale as he displayed a series of figures wrapped in white cloth and gathered around a bonfire.
Behind the white figures, which appear to represent ghosts, a black trash bag is seen hanging from a tree branch.
Soon after the Halloween decorations were displayed, the police stormed Daniel’s property to question him about the setup that reminded people of KKK lynching.
“They said they had had complaints from a couple of people in the neighborhood saying that there were reports of a black person hanging from a tree and there were people hanging around it in cloaks, which was absolutely shocking — in white cloaks,” the surprised homeowner said in an interview with ABC Radio Adelaide.
As Mr. Abbie added, the decorations that sparked outrage in the neighborhood had nothing to do with the white supremacist group known as the Ku Klux Klan.
“Obviously, we were going for little ghosts dancing around a little bonfire and there’s a body bag hanging from a tree, which can be confronting. But it’s absolutely not anything to do with racism or the KKK or anything like that,” he added.
Following a series of complaints, the father-of-three agreed to modify the setup.
“Once they realized I wasn’t who they thought were expecting to meet on the driveway, we had a good laugh and they ended up saying they loved the idea of the ghost,” Mr. Abbie told ABC Radio Adelaide.
“The only thing they suggested was the hanging body bag in the tree, to bring it down.point 192 | We couldn’t believe it until they mentioned it and I turned around and looked at the display and I went, ‘Oh, right, OK, I get it’, and then my partner was inside and she looked through the window and thought, ‘Oh, wow, that does look really bad’.point 403 |
”point 3 | 1
Replaced!