Lynn Kimsey brought a 12-foot skeleton named Skelly to the Bohart Museum Society's annual pre-Halloween party at UC Davis, turning a hallway display into the night’s biggest prop. The skeleton stood in the Academic Surge Building with LED eyes glowing and a spider corpse dangling from one arm.
Kimsey said, “We got it at Home Depot a couple of weeks ago to celebrate our son’s 40th birthday.” The next morning, she added, “It's in West Sacramento at our son's yard.”
UC Davis hallway display
The skeleton appeared inside the Academic Surge Building, where the Bohart Museum of Entomology is based in Room 1124. That setting gave the decoration a sharper edge than a front-yard setup would have had: the museum holds more than eight million insect specimens and maintains a live petting zoo with Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects and tarantulas.
Jason Bond leads the Bohart Museum and the Bohart Museum Society, and the party gave Skelly a second life beyond the yard. Instead of serving only as a seasonal lawn piece, it became part of a museum gathering where a giant Halloween prop could play off the insects and specimens around it.
Home Depot's July 2020 release
Home Depot introduced Skelly in July 2020, and Wikipedia says the skeleton was first released in 2020 and kept selling through 2023, when it sold out for the holiday. Home Depot also created an updated version in 2024 with customizable glowing LED eyes, and it sells a 7-foot skeletal dog called Skelly's Dog.
The product's spread shows how a one-off seasonal novelty became a repeat item with a real afterlife: the hashtag 12footskeleton had more than 89 million views on TikTok by 2023. For a decoration that started as a retail oddity, that kind of visibility explains why it could move from viral feed to family birthday gift and then into a university museum hallway.
West Sacramento birthday use
Kimsey's account gives the clearest reason the skeleton showed up at UC Davis at all: the purchase was tied to a family birthday, not just Halloween. That split use is the story’s twist, because Skelly was not simply staged as a seasonal novelty; it was also bought for a son's 40th birthday and later parked in West Sacramento.
For anyone watching the life cycle of these giant decorations, the practical takeaway is simple: Skelly has moved well past one season and one setting. It can be bought weeks ahead, repurposed for a family event, and then reappear in a public space where the size, lighting and placement do the rest.
