Decapitated Man Halloween Display Terrifies Tennessee Town, Prompting Calls To Police

A police department in Tennessee had to attend to panicked calls from residents, thanks to a homeowner’s way-too-realistic Halloween decoration, reports said.

Terrified residents in Greeneville, Tennessee, called 911 after they mistook an early Halloween decoration that looked like a bloody man whose head seemed to be chopped off by a garage door.

The Greene County Sheriff's department said it had received calls about a "suspicious person lying in a driveway with bloody handprints on the garage".

After the initial reports, when police rushed to investigate the scene, they found that it was a puppet stuffed with straw.

The department posted a photo on their Facebook page early Wednesday letting everyone know the gory sight was, in fact, a Halloween decoration and not a corpse and asked people not to call 911 to report it. “Instead, congratulate the homeowner on a great display," the sheriff's office wrote.

According to the CBS affiliate WJHL-TV and the NBC affiliate MyTwinTiers.com, a resident, Johnny Riddle, made a panicked call to 911 after seeing what appeared to be a dead body in his neighbor's driveway. He said on the call: "There's a guy laying in his driveway, with two big bloody handprints on side of the house. It looks like he is dead I don't know I didn't stop I just came on to work."

He told the website: "I thought it was somebody, I thought it was somebody laying up there on the driveway."

The creator of the scary decoration, Joseph Lovergive said police came pounding on his door to check the scene. "This morning about 10 o'clock I get a pounding on the door. I said thank you guys for caring but I'm doing just fine.”

Lovergive said Halloween was his family’s favorite time of the year and he was planning on adding more decorations. He did not expect that the decapitated man’s installation would be taken so seriously by people that emergency services would be called in, reports said.

"I thought it looked so real and so fun and I hope people don't take offense," Lovergine stated.

Some neighbors, however, told MyTwinTiers.com that they did not realize what was in the yard until it was pointed out to them and thought it was funny.

People also commented on the Facebook post by the police department and congratulated Lovergive for the realistic display.

"Literally congratulations to these people making something look so real!" one user wrote.

This is not the first time a Halloween decoration has sparked panicked calls to police and emergency services. A dummy of a dead body as a part of Halloween decoration in Detroit had some people calling the police thinking it is an actual person in October 2015.

The spooky celebration is observed every year in a number of countries including the U.S. on Oct. 31.