Patrick Smith may be 45 years old, but he’s just a kid a heart.

The kid in Smith really comes out for Halloween, when he decorates his Villa Rosa Ridge yard in Temple with all sorts of ghouls and goblins to entertain, and scare, neighborhood children and their parents.

“I’m an overgrown kid,” he said. “I just haven’t grown up yet.”

Smith has a 17-year-old son and a 17-year-old step-daughter, but he freely admits his Halloween obsession isn’t done for anyone but himself.

“When I was growing up, there was always one guy on the block who had a good set up and scared the kids at Halloween,” he said. “I always wanted to be like that guy.”

Many of Smith’s family and friends play a part in his Halloween fun, dressing up on the frightful night to provide good-natured entertainment for unsuspecting trick-or-treaters. Smith, who drives a truck for a medical supply company, dresses as a crazy doctor on Halloween night and performs a fake surgery on a dummy in his driveway. For that realistic look, Smith uses real IV bags, fake blood and last year he used pig intestines that spilled out of the dummy.

Smith also has his yard decked out like a cemetery with tombstones bearing the names of family and friends, coffins he built himself, ghosts hanging throughout the scene, a humongous spider in a web with baby dolls stuck in the web, decapitated heads that appear to be floating, and, of course, haunting background music and crazy lighting.

“My front yard looks like a cemetery, so you can’t miss it,” he said.

Never one to sit on his hands, Smith is still coming up with ideas with only a few days remaining until Halloween. He’s planning to add dry ice to give his cemetery a foggy effect, as well as two extra coffins with live people in them and a dog kennel with a live person inside.

Trick-or-treaters must pass all of this to get to their candy with a few surprises along the way. However, he takes it easy on the small children so he doesn’t scar them for life.

“Kids who come here are going to get scared, they’re going to get a treat, they’re going to get tricked and they don’t have to run fast, but they need to run faster than the person in front of them,” Smith said.

“It’s just all about having fun with these kids. Everybody’s got the trunk-or-treats now, and I understand the reason for all that, but this is what Halloween is all about, having fun with ghosts and goblins. We have a real good time with it.”

Smith’s hobby isn’t as expensive as you one may think because he makes a lot of his decorations himself, gets them on sale after the holiday season or receives some of it from friends whose kids have outgrown the season.

Smith also goes all out for Christmas and the stacks of plastic crates full of Christmas decorations are testament to the enormity of his display that is coming in just a few weeks.