It all started when owner, Richard Marte, participated in a Halloween decoration and costume competition at a campground. After some taunting by pessimistic members of the community and a few failures, he became determined to create a winning scene. The following year, he and his family dressed as an undead wedding party–including anyone ages 6 and up. He found some talking skeletons online to decorate their area as well. From that year on, they won the competition with flying colors. In 2003, the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was released. He watched the movie on an airplane and instantly became fascinated with the franchise. Hit with a storm-sized wave of inspiration, he began researching how to make his own talking and moving skeletons. The captain animatronic was the first to be built–before any of the props. From then it cannonballed into a vast sea(his front lawn and driveway) packed with 12 self-designed skeletons, two halves of a broken ship with its sails, a jail cell, a tavern, and so much more. His pristine attention to detail and dedication to making children smile is what makes Ship Wreck Cove so special. Richard tells Faces of LI in an interview, “People think I’m nuts, but after the Superbowl, I’ll start thinking about what I’m doing for Halloween…Each of their heads has 4 RC servos (robotic devices), which makes them move. I built my own mounts to make their heads nod and tilt and the jaw move. I sit there with a joystick and program each song…One song took me 40 hours. You get bonkers listening to the same song over and over again. The front of the ship I’ve had for 18 years. Four years ago, we made the back of the ship. We bought some PVC pipe and just started building. Everything is hand built. We start setting up the last week in August and finish in October. The skeletons are all my family, but my favorites are probably the two in the jail cell – Boris and Wilfred. Those are my first corpse skeletons that I made. Wilfred is very crude and shaky, but he works. I built the jail cell after them, and then I built a wall to hide my house.This is all for the tiny kids. One little girl has been coming here for 5 or 6 years. She sends pictures, even gave me a little bracelet. When you have 600 people in front of your house, it’s a lot of fun. We all dress up – I’m Captain Jack”