Tombstones honoring Irish wins bring fright to opponents

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- It's Halloween, and in honor of the holiday, ABC57 Kickoff has a bit of a spooky superfan segment.

Don Elliott is a big Irish fan and wanted to figure out how to combine two of his loves - Halloween decorations and Fighting Irish football.

"I was just so excited that they kept winning, and I'm a big baseball guy so very superstitious," said Elliott.

Let's go back to 2012, when Notre Dame was in the throes of a perfect regular season. Elliott wanted to find a creative way to showcase his Irish fandom, his love for Halloween, and perhaps a bit of his artistry as well. That's when it clicked for him.

"I wanted some tasteful decorations, and I thought, 'wait a minute, wouldn't it be cool to make some cemetery tombstones of the teams that we defeated,' and it just kept happening and happening so it was great to see people come back and take pictures, with the yard and with the tombstones," said Elliott.

So, he made one, and then another, and then another, until his entire front yard was covered.

But he says he doesn't do it every year, just when he feels it's right, and in 2026, that itch needed to be scratched once again.

"It's a little time consuming, but I don't know if it's that difficult, what I would do is I would take the image of let's say the Purdue train, I just kind of went with what images look cool to me, so for UNC, actually with all of them, I take my projector, I project it onto a sheet of thicker Styrofoam, and then I trace that out with sharpie pen, and then I take my jigsaw, I jigsaw it out, then take my Dremel, and Dremel into the black spaces so you kind of get 3D image look to it, and then the black, grey, and white, were the color tones that I was going to go with, and attach that to the Styrofoam, that this time, has a wood backing behind it, so what I do is a I put a wooden stake into the back of it, and then I drill it into the wood so it has that stability so it doesn't blow away in the mind," said Elliott.

While he was looking forward to a chance to make a tombstone for BYU, the Cougars had other plans, but so did his wife. 

"We took that loss, and it was a tough loss, but also, it was a small loss, so I was thinking to myself and talking to my wife, and she kind of gave me the idea, I was originally going to put a tombstone on its side, and she was like, 'what if you made it really small?' and I thought that was a great idea so it came from her, and it was a really great idea, and I kind of like the play that it is a small loss for the Irish. It's a loss nonetheless, but a small one, and my sons were like, 'you have to put the 0:01 on there,'" said Elliott.

Elliot says he has actually adjusted his process over the years and now makes the tombstones in a way that allows them to be re-used, should he feel the need to do this again down the road.