The Hartford Courant has an article about some of the stranger yard ornaments one can get these days, including headless, armless children.

The once-imagined lovely garden is occupied with huge, ugly, warty frogs; bears doing squat lifts; sobbing angels; and gnomes, gnomes and more gnomes, multiplying like nymphomaniac nymphets high on Scott's Fertilizer.

And into this already strange and scary flower bed marches a parade of headless, armless children - boy figures in overalls and girl figures especially frightening in their short white socks and red Mary Janes.

They're called "outdoor statuary" or "yard ornaments," but to anyone who basks in the glow of a buttercup held under a child's chin or smiles at the sight of a toddler picking daisies, these jardinieres are better suited to a gardening straight-to-video called "Night of the Living Deadheads."

"It's human nature to decorate one's environment," says Ellin Goetz, who runs a landscape architecture business in Naples, Fla. [The Hartford Courant]

I so would love to find some of the headless children planters and just put them around the yard for when my parents come home. I can just see them pulling in late at night after driving and finding them invading the yard. Another ornament mentioned is the Digger Dog, which is supposed to look like a dog with its head down a hole. According to the description it "barks, whines, stomps his back foot and (oops!) passes wind." And you can set it to be motion activated to "get a good laugh from neighbors, guests, and passersby."

This gives me a bunch of ideas. How about hands that look like a zombie trying to claw its way out of the ground (or maybe just a face peering out from the dirt)? It could be animated so passersby could hear the moans of the dead and maybe an occasional "brainsssss."