The wooden crate has been following us around for years.

It lived with Chris and her parents before she was my wife, before she was my girlfriend, and well before I even knew she existed. She and her parents hand-carried the crate from China to their home in Oakland, California, in 1989. At the time, Chris was on a pre-med path in college and I guess an authentic model of a human skeleton was a thing to have. His name became Ziggy.

After her parents died, the crate came to live with us. First it hung out in the crawlspace under our townhome. For the last few years, since we’ve moved house, it’s been in our bar (the space formerly known as the “dining room” … whatever that is).

The crate is a legitimate piece of work and very well-constructed. For a skeleton, Ziggy has lived a cushioned existence; inside the wood framework and paneling was a heavy-duty (and unmarked) plastic-laminated cardboard box which was stuffed full of confetti streamers.

Chris’s Dad further secured the crate for travel by tying both twine (?) and rope around the sides. We didn’t want to open the crate in part due to his knot work, which was quite intricate. But after 35+ years, just last Sunday, we unboxed Ziggy for Halloween.

Like a macabre floor lamp from Bela Lugosi’s Ikea, there was some assembly required. The torso and left arm were attached but the right arm was loose in the box. The legs were wrapped in butcher’s paper and required drilling through the hip joint sockets to install.

The bones themselves are painted fiberglass. At least that’s what the instructions handily shoved in Ziggy’s spring-loaded mouth say. Mostly the structure is a strange, sickly, not-quite-white color. The teeth are painted actual white which provides a nice contrast against the rest of the dead-color skull. Other parts like the spinal disks and some of the ribs are kind of a dull gray, like the color of a disused battleship but with even less aesthetic consideration.

The weird part is the paint up and down the spinal column feels tacky, easily transferring to your fingers, even after all these years. It’s either somehow still wet or is grossly degrading.

Think about this, too: Ziggy was likely modeled after an actual person. In America if you go into a Halloween shop the skeletons tend to be generic, more of an artist’s interpretation of what a human sack of bones should look like. There is usually very little texture or subtlety, and frequently the color is too white. The representation isn’t exactly cartoonish, but I think if you were to go all Indiana/Jones on an actual body you’d discover the inner structure looks more like what came out of our crate.

Comparatively, Ziggy definitely has the vibe of a person, albeit a smaller one. Run your hands over the surfaces and feel the textures and irregularities. Even though the papers say “fiberglass” the noises the bones make knocking into each other don’t quite sound like plastic.

It’s not difficult to imagine a person in the bowels of the China National Chemicals Import & Export Corporation (Jiangsu Branch) factory standing over a stainless steel slab under a harsh single fluorescent tube digging into a 55-gallon drum of plaster while considering the most expedient way to pull a mold from roughly 206 people sticks.

The afternoon of his unboxing Ziggy mostly just hung around, especially after we put him on his stand. After cleaning out the torso confetti – and removing the scraps stubbornly adhered to the still-sticky spinal column – we drilled and mounted his legs. The smell of ancient fiberglass, oddly sweet but not in a good way, is still stuck in my nose.

Installing his legs was perhaps a mistake because now Ziggy is maybe trying to steal my cars.

Monday afternoon when I took the garbage out, I found him in our old BMW 323i Baur TC2. The folding roof of that car is usually down/off. Ziggy was sitting in the driver’s seat with one hand on the steering wheel and one on the gear lever like he was ready to go. Except I’m guessing Ziggy can’t drive stick, which makes sense since he probably never had a chance to learn before being crated up. Good thing, too, since I tend to leave the keys in the ignition of that car.

Early Tuesday morning as we left to take our son to school, Chris and I found Ziggy in our BMW Z3. Think James Bond in Goldeneye, but with a slightly sticky old plastic skeleton instead of Pierce Brosnan. He (Ziggy) hadn’t put the top down yet. We’re not sure how long he had been sitting there, and we couldn’t tell by his expression. The Z3 is tucked tight behind the Baur in the deep part of the garage so he couldn’t have gotten too far, anyway.

Later on Tuesday, just after lunch, the electricians arrived to wire up our new furnace (the old one had apparently become a rather efficient carbon monoxide factory). When we all went into the garage to look at the breaker box, Ziggy was seated behind the wheel of my BMW 530i. The electricians averted their eyes. I assume they thought it was a Halloween thing.

The Subaru Outback, also usually in the garage, uses a fob instead of a metal key. We don’t know if he’s tried to take this one. Would Ziggy understand push-button start? Unknown, but without the fob in his pocket (he doesn’t have pockets) he would have just gotten an “Access Key Not Detected” error message on the instrument cluster.

Other than the Baur, Ziggy doesn’t appear to know where we keep the car keys. Plus, if he came into the house to look for them we’d have heard; the alarm chime sounds when an outside door is opened.

As I write this on Thursday evening, there’s been no new movement. Literally. However, tomorrow Ziggy is due to return to the bar for Halloween. He’ll be sitting on his wooden crate, rather than in it. He’ll be facing out to the walkway and backlit in blood red so the neighbors and trick-or-treaters can see him.

That could pose a problem if on the way through the kitchen Ziggy spots the bowl where we keep all the car keys.