Alida Bowden has turned her home into quite the Halloween display. (Bruce R. Bennett / The Post)More photos | More great local haunts | Map, directions It started right outside the front door. Oh, it was simple enough back then. A Halloween poem, warning of danger within. A rat or two. Some spiders. Then, something frightening began to happen on this quiet street in suburban Boca Raton. First the graveyard. Then the ghouls. Then the fog and the lights and the eerie sounds from within. The neighbors and the cars and the YouTube video. “It just got more elaborate and more elaborate,” says Alida Bowden. Yes, she who wears a necklace with a dead brown recluse spider dangling from it (the setting glows in the dark) is also the Goddess of The Understatement. Holidays affect different people in different ways. Some ladies have a dozen Christmas sweaters. Some families go all out for Thanksgiving — the hats and the pilgrims and the paper turkeys. Some sentimental fools love the red of Valentine’s Day. But for Bowden, the soft spot is Halloween. It always has been, ever since she was a small girl in Miami growing up with her grandmother — a woman who thought “every holiday was a celebration.” “I love anything Goth,” she says. Over the past 10 or so years, Bowden’s graveyard on the front lawn of her house at 2688 N.W. 42nd St. has become neighborhood lore. “It’s so authentic, what she does,” says Bob Buruchian, whose 15-year-old son has grown up with Bowden next door. “There are several other neighbors who partake, but hers is really, really well done.” And what that means is that Halloween is never very far from Bowden’s mind. She’s always adding — a skeleton coming up from the grave, another giant rat with red, flashing eyes, a monster head on a stake. She makes bodies out of PVC pipe and plastic bubble wrap. She scours the salvage yards for real iron gates. And she memorizes poems for when she’s standing over her steaming pot of scariness. “We always ask her, 'Alida, where do you put all that stuff?’ ” said Buruchian.

We asked, too, and, as it turns out, this kind of obsession calls for some serious storage solutions, which means Bowden pays for a unit in which to put all the Halloween (and Christmas) gear. She won’t tell us what she’s spent on her displays.

“For a while, it was a toss-up between Christmas and Halloween,” she says, about decorating. “Then Halloween kind of won the race in the long term.” The mental planning never really ends, but with about three weeks to go she makes the trek to the storage unit. And she knows just which 36 bins to lug home. All the Halloween stuff is color-coded with either an orange or a purple snap-on lid. Frightening!! This year, the summer heat still upon us, Bowden started staging the front yard a good three weeks before Halloween. Once she’d pulled all the stuff from storage, the inside of their house was a giant maze of skulls, cauldrons and glow-in-the dark spider gloves. Sorting it out took hours. A ghoul, a monster here. A spider, a tombstone there. “Each year, I like to add something a little different,” says Bowden, who says it takes four, 10-hour days to put together the graveyard. “It’s a full-time job.” Buruchian says people drive down the street, sloowwwllyyy, just to see her display. “I thinks she’s a frustrated set designer,” said Buruchian, a television producer. This year, come Halloween night, as the sun begins to set, there she will be: the vampire among them, looming in the graveyard with blood dripping from who knows where, watching all her work create all that wonder. “I love to watch the kids, even the adult kids,” said Bowden, who is retired from Siemens Communications Inc. “We all get such wonderful joy from it.” And. Well. You might be wondering. Does this woman have a better half? Indeed she does. His name is Bryan Bowden and he’s a finance guy and he happens to have an obsession of his own this time of year, and it’s not Halloween. It’s professional football — which means he’s a little too busy to be of much help, except for the heavy lifting. “He doesn’t quite understand,” she says. Although ... There was that one year that she did manage to combine their two great loves. That was the year Alida Bowden dressed up for Halloween as an Oakland Raiders cheerleader. A dead one. ANATOMY OF A HAUNTED HOUSE What does it take to make your front lawn as frightening as Alida Bowden’s? We’re glad you asked: 50 skulls 3 dozen monsters (mostly heads) 5 pairs of prosthetic fangs (blood is not optional) 200 candy bars (not the small ones) 12 plastic rats and 2 dozen spiders 2 dozen light bulbs, usually blue or black 40 hours of sweaty labor 1 bottle of poison, corked with a skull Untold numbers of metal gates, tombstones, vampires, skeletons and fog (the kind you make yourself) 36 storage bins 1 very frightening homeowner IF YOU GO ... Take I-95 south to Yamato Road, head west on Yamato to St. Andrews. Take a left on St. Andrews to Northwest 44th Street. Turn right. Take a left on Northwest 26th Avenue and then a right on Northwest 43rd Street, Next, turn left on Northwest 26th Way. Northwest 26th Way becomes Northwest 42nd Street. 2688 is on the left.