The baby doll across the street started it.

Mark Williams and Heidi Loutzenhiser were new to the Piedmont neighborhood four years ago. The couple love Halloween and wanted to decorate

for the holiday.

"But I wanted a theme," Loutzenhiser said. "That way it wouldn't get out of control."

On their way out the door one morning, they spotted the doll. A neighbor kid had abandoned it in the yard. They'd found their theme.

Now the couple's home -- which they call

-- has 700 dolls. Most of the year, the 3,110-square-foot, 1930s house is just a home. But every fall, the couple spend weeks freeing the dolls from their jigsaw storage in the garage. Then, for a few days, they open the asylum to anyone who wants a sight of the macabre. Halloween night from 6 to 9 p.m. is the last night the public can visit the asylum.

They have dolls on the mantle, on the floor and in the yard. There's a doll peering through the kitchen window, and a doll resting on the couch.

The dolls -- "some unadulterated, some very adulterated," Williams said -- are in various shapes of disrepair. The couple looks all year for messed-up toys. The electronic dolls whose cries for Mommy have been mutated by age or water or who-knows-what are perfect additions. If the couple find a doll still in good condition, they'll rough the toy up with hot glue and paint.

Luther Barry -- the only doll with a name -- mans the entry. The rest of the year, he remains buried in the backyard. The earth has gradually degraded Barry to something worthy of the asylum.

Williams and Loutzenhiser are not normally dark-minded people, they insist. They both work for General Electric -- he's a business analyst; she's a clinical software consultant. In their spare time, he roasts his own coffee beans. She knits.

Though the first year was awkward, inviting their new neighbors into a version of their home decked out in dolls, the last two years have been great, they said. Neighbors even leave dolls on the stoop to add to the collection.

Sunday night, Williams pointed out his favorite finds. He wound past the miniature guillotine he built, then stopped in front of a wild-haired baby playing the piano.

"Oh, I think this one is cute," he said.

He called to his wife. "Show them the baby in the kitchen," he said. "Because I hate that one."

Loutzenhiser reappeared with a normal-looking, bald-headed baby in white pajamas. Sometimes, she explained, she finds electronic toys at thrift stores but has no idea how they were ever supposed to function.

"This one took me a long time to figure out because he didn't even come with a pacifier," she said.

Loutzenhiser stuck a homemade pacifier in the doll's mouth, then pulled it out. She set it on the couch, where it sat for the next 10 minutes, eerily sucking air.

The asylum continues through their back yard, past the cemetery with tombstones marked for Chatty Cathy (silenced in 1971) and the Unknown Barbie. Fog drifted over a projection of the supermarionation TV show "Thunderbirds." And it ended in a no-kids-allowed workspace.

There, a hazy, 1930s jazz recording soundtracked a half-finished doll autopsy. Other toys hung from meat hooks.

Right in the spot where, for the rest of the year, Williams roasts his coffee.