Highway to Halloween: The Lowe’s Haunted Living 12-ft Talking LED Bone Collector Animatronic

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We’re almost to October, and already I’ve been seeing people starting to decorate for Halloween around the neighborhood. While I haven’t begun my yard just yet, I have been plotting out what kind of a display I’ll be doing.

With GeekDad, I launched this season’s Halloween coverage way back in May with my review of the Lowe’s 12-ft Animated Scarecrow. Here we are at the end of September, and thanks to Lowe’s, my graveyard now has a new, giant companion for the Scarecrow: the Haunted Living 12-ft Talking LED Bone Collector Animatronic. 

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What Is the Lowe’s Haunted Living 12-ft Talking LED Bone Collector Animatronic?

The Lowe’s Haunted Living 12-ft Talking LED Bone Collector Animatronic is a 12-ft tall indoor/outdoor prop manufactured by Tekky and exclusively sold by Lowe’s. It retails for $399, and is available at Lowe’s stores and through the Lowe’s website. It has the following features:

• Giant-size animated ghoul features glowing LED lighted eyes, and moving head and synchronized mouth movement with eerie lights and sinister sounds.
• Animated Bone Collector makes the scene this Halloween as a premium over-sized animatronic, engineered for maximum fun and fright by Lowe’s Haunted Living and Tekky.
• From the graveyard to your haunted home, the lights, sounds and action of the boneyard bad guy haunt your house as the colossal keeper comes to life to greet your guests! Elaborate costume, giant shovel and burlap bag details including skeleton with eerie LED eyes.
• Sound, human sensor or footpad/button activated (footpad/button sold separately).
• Power your prop with the 5.9V 3A DC adapter — included.

Assembling the Lowe’s Haunted Living 12-ft Talking LED Bone Collector Animatronic

You can find instructions on assembling the Bone Collector here.

When you open the box, you’ll see a protective piece of cardboard. Flipping over that piece actually reveals a few items, including the instruction booklet, tethers, and the snap lock removal tool that was so useful in assembling and disassembling the Scarecrow.

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Much like with the 12-Ft Scarecrow, the Bone Collector box is jam-packed with pieces. If you’re intending to store the prop back in the box after Halloween, it’s a good idea to take pictures of where everything is located as you remove parts.

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Everything arrived secure and in good shape, with sculpted and mechanical pieces surrounded with bubble wrap.

If you read my review of the 12-ft Scarecrow, you won’t be surprised to find out that assembly of both that prop and the Bone Collector are fairly similar. As with most oversized Halloween props, the framework of the Bone Collector is made of metal pieces that you connect to each other via retractable metal buttons. The pieces are labeled with letters, and you match the same letter to each other for foolproof assembly.

While two people are recommended to assemble the Bone Collector, I did the bulk of the assembly myself, only needing assistance when it was time to stand the prop up and position it on the lawn.

The first part of assembly, and the most tedious, is to separate the base from all of the other metal components that are attached together with twist ties and zip ties. I say tedious because there are a lot of twist ties to undo:

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Here are all those pieces, after you remove the ties:

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You’ll be building from the base up. To start off , you’ll attach the legs to the base, adding the shoes and pants before attaching the waist and spine frames. As with the Scarecrow, the control box for the Bone Collector is located on the upper left leg pole.

After attaching the spine frame, you tilt the parts back onto the shipping box or a table or platform for stability. At that point, you attach the waist frame and move on to the assembly of the upper body.

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Next up is the shoulder frame, which has a mechanical assembly to turn the head side to side once fully assembled. The tethers are clipped onto the brackets on the shoulder and spine frames.

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At this point, the instructions tell you to attach the arm frames, which I did. However, I later had to remove the arms in order to get them through the sleeves of the costume. So, if you get the Bone Collector yourself, hold off on attaching the arms until you put the shirt onto the prop. 

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The last step before adding the shirt is to place the shoulder wire frame into the color-coded brackets on the shoulder frame:

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After spending a bit of time attempting to get the shirt onto the prop with the arms still on, I finally removed the arms, and had a much easier time getting the shirt over the body without them. I then reattached the arms, feeding them up through the sleeves. There are openings at both armpits between the shirt and the coat for easy access. I’m actually at a loss why the instructions didn’t instruct you to wait on the arms, especially as that’s how you get the shirt on with the Scarecrow. 

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Once the shirt is on, you add the head and hands, and the front base supports . It’s also a good idea to pull out the tethers through the openings in the costume at this point, to save yourself from having to get up on a ladder later. Also be sure that the connection wire from the head has a clear path down towards the power supply at this stage.

I grabbed a neighbor (who was enjoying watching me assemble this behemoth) to help stand the Bone Collector upright, getting him positioned where you want on the lawn.

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In the final stages of assembly, you’ll put together the oversized plastic shovel, attach the pants with Velcro to the shirt and waist frame, connect all the wires to the control box, and stake the frame and tethers down into the lawn.

Here’s the finished prop:

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I connected the power cord to an outdoor outlet, and then it was time to make sure that everything was working properly. I turned him on, and walked in front of the sensor, which is located on his left pants leg. Here are his two phrases:

He seems to be working great! But I would have to wait until night to make sure that he was lighting up properly. In the meanwhile, here’s a closer look at some of his parts:

Once night came, I went outside to take a few more pictures and run the Bone Collector through his paces again. With the darkness, I could see how the eyes lit up and moved, which isn’t apparent in the sunlight.

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You can also see that the skeleton that is ripping through the Bone Collector’s bag has eyes that light up red.

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Here’s the Bone Collector in action at night:

Lowe’s Haunted Living 12-ft Talking LED Bone Collector Animatronic – Final Thoughts

This is my second giant prop from Lowe’s, and it’s really a doozy. Not only does it light up and speak, but the head turns and the eyes realistically move back and forth. As I found with the 12-ft Scarecrow, as impressive as it looks during the day, it’s in the nighttime that the Bone Collector really comes to life.

Assembly was easy, other than dealing with the shirt while the arms were still attached. Once I got those arms off though, the shirt went on pretty effortlessly. Some of the stakes got bent while I was hammering them into the ground, but those are easy enough to replace with something sturdier for next year, like some steel tent or trampoline stakes.

The hooded jacket is constructed of a nice, thick material that should help resist rain and keep in shape. The dark color is likely to fade in the sun, so some UV spray like Scotchgard Sun and Water Shield may be worth applying.

My one concern with the Lowe’s Haunted Living 12-ft Talking LED Bone Collector Animatronic is with the skeleton. The skull has a wide opening at the neck, and is likely to collect water when it rains. Hopefully, the rainwater that gets in will be minimal, and by emptying the skull out, I can avoid an electrical short. 

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I appreciated that the arms have foam to add a bit of bulk. There are even plastic elbow pads, to give a more natural look! Unfortunately, there is nothing to add size to the legs, and when the wind blows, it’s apparent that there are just slim poles for legs. However, if that’s something that bothers you visually about the prop, it would be easy enough to add some foam to the legs to fill them out.

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Already, people have been slowing their cars down to check out the Bone Collector, and kids have excitedly been looking him over. And that’s without the prop even being turned on! The Bone Collector is pretty much guaranteed to be a huge hit this Halloween. I love all the motion you get in his head and eyes, and the mouth movement syncs up nicely with the audio. With the popularity of graveyard scenes in people’s yards, he’s a great fit for just about any home. 

The only question that remains is, how is Lowe’s going to top him next year?

For more information on the Lowe’s Haunted Living 12-ft Talking LED Bone Collector Animatronic, visit Lowe’s website.

Lowe’s provided a Bone Collector for evaluation, but had no input into this review.

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