Thursday, October 28, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

HALLOWEEN YEAR-ROUND: Flirting With Death

Pahrump couple's macabre fascination not just a phase

Bryan Schoening sits with a selection of his coffins, which range from adult size down to miniatures. Dusty Schoening loads her husband Bryan into one of his handcrafted coffins, which could then be loaded into their white hearse, which they have dubbed Mr. Frost. The front yard of Bryan and Dusty Schoening's Pahrump home is decorated like a cemetery. Photos by K.M. Cannon.

Many neighborhoods have someone who keeps Christmas decorations up all year. But one Pahrump neighborhood has a house with coffins and skeletons and headstones on display year-round.

It's the home of Bryan and Dusty Schoening.

It's not hard to find.

Just look for the cemetery sign and the faux wrought-iron fence in the front yard. Enter the gate and behold a phalanx of faux tombstones, some with above-ground coffins that can be opened to reveal a faux corpse.

Oh, look for four hearses parked in the driveway, too.

"It's not a passing phase," says Dusty, 35, smiling, as the visitor takes in the scenery.

The interior of the Schoenings' house continues their theme that life is, in the end, about death. A gaggle of skeletons sit on the living room sofa. Some have decrepit skin drooping from their bones, as Bryan has recently taken up latex fabrication. Hanging on the walls are farm tools and axes that have tableaux of wakes and cemeteries on their blades, painted in folk art style.

"This is what makes me smile and giggle when I come home," adds Bryan, also 35, who works days as a cabinet-maker but sidelines as a coffin-maker.

"I'm an artist first and foremost," says Bryan. "My art has always been dark. I've always been morbid."

He is the one who fashions most of the death-related decor in and out of the Schoening home, though Dusty takes an equal hand in locating hearses being liquidated either by private owners or funeral homes that are going out of business.

Some of Bryan's coffins are inlaid with fine woods. Some are constructed to do double-duty as coffee tables, book cases and curio cabinets. Some are small and used as jewelry boxes.

He and Dusty sell them through their side business, called Coffin It Up. They arrange sales either on the Internet or at conventions for people interested in the Gothic subculture. One definition for "Gothic" is "characterized by gloom and mystery and the grotesque." The style can be applied to fashion, makeup, music or literature.

People in the Gothic subculture often purchase Schoening coffins as eye-catching art pieces or props.

But other Schoening coffins go to individuals who intend to one day actually inter either themselves or a loved one in the handcrafted pieces.

Just recently, a Pahrump car mechanic who had been raised in Bulgaria came by to order a coffin for his elderly father. The man was pleased, Dusty reported, that Bryan uses heavy-duty thumbscrews imported from Europe to fasten the lid to the coffin proper.

There are nuances to coffins, and distinctions between coffins and caskets. American coffins are usually hinged, while European coffins are fastened to their lids with large screws that can be turned with the thumb and forefinger.

The way Bryan uses the terms, a casket is a metal box that, when viewed from the top, has four sides. A coffin, which is usually made of wood, has six sides when viewed from the top. This allows for greater width in the middle of the container, where the torso, shoulders and arms would be positioned.

Asked how he developed his specialty, Bryan says he was fascinated from an early age by bones. He grew up in Buena Vista, Colo., where weathered deer and cattle bones can readily be found. His grade-school teachers found they could motivate him to do well on assignments by rewarding him with such bones. "They had a (cattle) skull for the end of the year," he remembers, laughing.

His first coffin came about because "several years ago, we needed a coffin. We like to decorate for Halloween," Bryan recounts. They were living in Oregon at the time, and their then-high-school age daughter wanted it to surprise her friends.

Bryan was working odd jobs in carpentry at the time. He tackled the project of building their daughter, Destiny, a coffin, and discovered that the six-sided shape of a coffin is challenging because the corners cannot be conventional 90-degree angles.

After the first one was done, he kept on experimenting. "I play with the shape, to see what I can make it do," he says. The angles affect the structural soundness of a coffin, which is important when it's going to stand upright for long periods of time.

The couple moved to Pahrump in 2002, after discovering the town on fairly regular vacations through the Southwest and to Death Valley, in particular.

Dusty is not a long-suffering wife who simply tolerates Bryan's tendency to build symbols of death, and accumulates them around the house. She actively supports it.

"I started wearing black finger nail polish when I was 11," she reports cheerfully, to remove the erroneous notion that Bryan somehow enmeshed her in his preoccupation.

The two are, clearly, independent spirits. Dusty ran away from home as a 13-year-old. She has since reconciled with her relatives, though she never moved back home. Bryan left home in his mid-teens, with his parents' permission. The two met in California in 1983, at a demonstration to protest the use of elephants in circus acts. They have been together ever since, living in a variety of locales including Oklahoma, Arizona and Oregon.

Contrary to assumptions of some people who have observed the Schoenings' decor, they are neither satanists nor believers in consumption of drugs or alcohol.

"I believe in what we're given" by nature, says Dusty. Neither she nor her husband belong to an organized religion and oppose the religious strife that accounts for a lot of the globe's violence. "I believe in the water, the dirt, the air."

In fact, the Schoenings get a charge out of safely chaperoning teens, including their daughter's friends, to music concerts. They also assist in an anti-DUI program annually at the Pahrump high school. They drive over in a hearse so Bryan can discuss the loss of his parents before the student body. The couple died in a 2002 New Mexico highway traffic accident, in a collision with a semi-truck whose driver was found to be under the influence of drugs.

Just as the adage says, to put the cart after the horse, the Schoenings started collecting hearses after they had been accumulating coffins. Their first thought was they needed one to deliver Bryan's customized coffins to customers. Then they realized they just plain enjoyed driving them.

"They're Cadillacs, and they're collectible and they're beautiful," says Dusty. The couple names each acquisition, and tries to get a matching vanity license plate. Mr. Frost is white, named after "Mister Frost," a thriller movie by the same name that starred Jeff Goldblum." Other hearses in the stable are Reaper, Doom and Kismet.

A fellow hearse-owner is Rich Strelak of Las Vegas. Asked to describe the Schoenings, he answers, "You'd think they'd be really bizarre people. They're just really nice people, very community-oriented people." Strelak, who helped form an informal club of recreational hearse owners including the Schoenings, owns a hearse and runs two haunted houses. This year his attractions are the Asylum and Hotel Fear.

"They're not bashful. You can't drive a hearse and be a wallflower," Strelak concludes.

The Schoenings agree. Hearse owners are outgoing and enjoy the responses to their vehicles. People are apt to either "make a sign of the cross or give a thumb's up" when they spot Mr. Frost, according to Dusty.

Ed Walterhouse, whose cabinet company employs Bryan, says the coffin-maker is an asset to his business. "Truthfully, Bryan has a little joy of something outside of work. It makes him twice the worker."

Destiny Schoening, 19, the couple's daughter, is philosophical about her parents' fascination with hearses and coffins: "It's what they do."

Now employed as a bank teller, Destiny laughs as she tells how various friends and coworkers have reacted to her unusual relatives. "My mom calls it `reverse rebellion.' I have to explain my parents, instead of them explaining me."