Old Sacramento in the fall would be a little more lifeless without its scarecrows.

Every year for at least a decade, the scarecrows have turned up on balconies, wooden sidewalks and a spooky-looking park to enchant visitors.

But the scarecrows fell apart as they grew older. Business owners have become reluctant to adopt them for storefronts in recent years.

So six Sacramento artists -- most who live in the grid -- were recruited to breathe new life (death?) into more than two dozen scarecrows in time for Halloween. Melissa Martinez, the Old Sacramento Business Association's new leader, is playing up Halloween in the business district this year to draw more visitors and shoppers.

"This year, I want to take it to the next level," she said. "It's going to be awesome."

Visitors can make scarecrows Sept. 26 and trick-or-treat on Halloween. The eerie below-ground-level space known as Atlantis Park will be turned into Scarecrow Park, complete with spooky nocturnal scenes, dramatic lighting and the creepiest scarecrows. "Skeleton" crews will conduct train rides on the Spookomotive. Public ghost tours will take place on weekend nights. And a local paranormal investigative group will do its best to determine whether departed spirits linger in Old Sacramento.

Scarecrow restoration began two weeks ago when illustrator span style="text-decoration:line-through;">Jackie Jacquelyn Bond, clothing designer Leendah Munoz and engineer Eric Vierria pulled 26 scarecrows from a dark storage container on the edge of Old Sacramento. They and three others, including Ariana Gillespie, volunteered to redo the scarecrows on a $200 budget.

"We have some of the most notorious artists in Sacramento participating in this — people who are known by their art, but not by their faces," said Munoz, standing before scarecrows set out beneath the underbelly of I-5.

They quickly got to work disemboweling the life-size figures, whose bodies, clothes and heads were falling apart. The scarecrow miners, dance hall girls, gamblers, settlers and "corpses" with nooses around their necks were built around metal skeletons wrapped in insulation, raffia and newspaper— some that had been rotting and molding.

"As soon as we saw them, we said, 'Oh, yes. They need us. They called to us,' " Munoz said.

The artists said some of the faces, created with a mix of styles and materials, were even more chilling. They said styrofoam heads, cartoon visages and others made from faux vegetables and flowers seemed to have lost their original purpose at the tops of decrepit bodies.

"There's a few of 'em that are pretty creepy; extra 'Children of the Corn' y," Vierria said, referring to a movie.

Over the past two weeks, the artists re-formed and restuffed the bodies, using raffia on the appendages to create an authentic scarecrow look. Bond hunted through thrift stores for some replacement clothing and vacuumed the clothing that still covered scarecrow bodies. Hair was fixed and hats placed on heads.

After getting permission to be "a little edgier," the artists made plaster masks of themselves and their friends, then painted on tortured faces for frightening finishing touches.

"They just needed some love," Bond said.

For more information about Halloween in Old Sacramento, go to http://www.oldsacramento.com/events-and-activities.php.

Photos by Suzanne Hurt, a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.