Mission Viejo Halloween: the 2025 winners

Happy Halloween, and welcome to the 2025 winners of Mission Viejo's Halloween and Fall Home Decorating Contest. Every year, neighbors across the city turn their front yards into something spooky, silly or spectacular, and the Mission Viejo Activities Committee picks the best of them.

We'll visit last year's five first-place homes. I'll tell you what each one looked like when it won. Displays change from year to year, so you may find something new. Please stay on the street and in the car, keep your voices friendly, and remember these are people's homes. Let's go find some ghosts.

Here it is: a pirate shipwreck, run by a crew of skeletons. Look up first. Skeleton sailors are climbing the rigging and perched up on the roof, with glowing purple bats hanging in the night sky above them. Along the front, pirates in tricorn hats keep watch under a Jolly Roger flag, and there's a ship's wheel standing by for whoever's brave enough to steer.

Then find the sea monsters. Green tentacles curl up out of the yard, and over on one side a great white shark is bursting up out of the yard, jaws wide open.

It's one of those yards where every time you look, you spot another skeleton doing another job. Somebody here clearly enjoyed giving each one of them something to do.

Start with the roof. A giant skeleton is climbing over the top of the house, glowing eyes and all, like it's trying to get in through the upstairs windows.

Down on the driveway, flames burst up from tall torches, and fog rolls across the yard. Two hooded, tattered figures stand guard in front of a painted haunted castle, and in the middle of it all there's a big circle on the ground, ringed with little candles, with a giant spider sitting right at its center.

Special effects is the right name for it. Fire, fog and light are doing most of the work here, and they turn an ordinary driveway into a stage.

This one is all about pumpkins. Glowing jack-o'-lanterns fill the front yard, sitting in a bed of tiny orange lights, and every single one has its own face: happy, sly, toothy, grumpy. More of them climb up a tall tower and arch right over the entryway.

There's a cozy corner, too, with hay bales and jack-o'-lantern pillows, like a pumpkin patch that's set up for visitors. And looking down over all of it is a tall, skinny skeleton figure in a dark suit, waving from above: the Pumpkin King himself.

Some displays aim to scare you. This one just wants you to smile, and it works.

Welcome to Dusty Gulch. The front of the house has turned into a frontier main street, with a General Store, a Saloon and a Bank, each lit up in its own color: green, purple and red.

Out front, a little picket fence wrapped in red lights holds back the residents. There are glowing skeletons, a witch in green, glowing cactus, and jack-o'-lanterns lined up along the boardwalk, plus a bale of hay piled with pumpkins in the middle of town.

It's the details that make it: a ghost town where everybody really is a ghost. It took real imagination, and a lot of hammering, to put a whole town on one front lawn.

This is a haunted mansion. A cemetery gate guards the front, with tombstones and a crypt entrance framed in skulls and bones. A figure in a hooded cloak holds a lantern by the path, and pale, ghostly women drift near the front steps.

Then look at the house itself. Glowing ghouls and skeletons are projected across the walls, moving in red and green light, so the whole house seems to be crawling with spirits.

It's the perfect ending: the lights, the shadows and the spirits drifting across the walls. Thank you for touring Mission Viejo's 2025 winners, and happy Halloween from all of your neighbors who made the city glow.