Police Order Cafe To Take Down ‘Gruesome’ Halloween Display

By :
Solent

With Halloween coming up, a lot of people are getting in the spirit of the horrifying holiday. But apparently this cafe went too far…

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Owners of the Memory Lane Cafe near Havant in Hampshire were told their display – featuring a female mannequin with duck tape over its mouth, a slaughtered baby, and a child’s body covered in blood (among other fun-filled japes) – was a bit too gory and gruesome for locals.

Solent

Owner of the cafe, Ian Payne has now been asked to pull down the display on ‘taste and decency’ grounds enforced by anti-social behaviour laws.

Buzzkill! It’s not like he made a joke out of dead… oh, hang on a minute, he kind of did though?

Lorraine Blackburn – whose son died when he was three-months-old – was so outraged by the scene that she immediately called the police. She slammed the display for being ‘sick’ and ‘totally insensitive’.

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Mr Payne has now removed the display – which was part of a local competition – but he was quick to defend his cafe’s decorations by saying the blood was only ‘tomato sauce’.

He told Portsmouth News:

We do a lot for the community and hold a lot of events. Basically this was just for publicity. It’s a front room with dismembered mannequins and one of them had a baby. The baby was cut up with blood and it did look gory. But it was just tomato sauce. More people loved it than hated it. Bad publicity is better than no publicity.

Apparently some people just can’t see the lighter side of grim death scenarios, can’t imagine why…