Most Halloween decorations repeat the same spooky line until the batteries run out. Uncle Murray is a different kind of skeleton. From his spot on one family’s porch in Alameda, California, he holds real conversations with anyone who walks up. He asks about their costume, cracks jokes and shares stories, and no two chats are ever the same.
The mind behind him belongs to 9-year-old Nathalie, who has spent weeks since early September bringing him to life with her dad, Jim Chabas. Together, they took a store-bought animatronic that could only recite a few pre-recorded lines and gave him a new computer brain, a voice and a whole personality: a scientist from beyond the grave who wears pink dolphin slippers.
For Nathalie, the project became a crash course in electronics, building and problem-solving. She also learned to use AI to build something rather than just chat with it, and she calls it her “co-pilot.” Scroll down to see how Uncle Murray came together, one wire at a time.
More info: unclemurray.org
A 6-foot Home Depot bartender skeleton with just a few phrases became Uncle Murray, a scientist who loves kids, candy, safe explosions and the color pink
The project began with John the Last Call Mixologist, one of the new additions to Home Depot’s 2026 Halloween collection. The roughly $179 animatronic came with tattooed arms, glowing eyes and a light-up cocktail glass to stir, but, as the family’s website puts it, “He only knew three sentences!” Nathalie, who had already been using AI, saw far more potential in the bony bartender. “I had been using AI, and I had an idea: we could give this cool skeleton his life back!” the 9-year-old explained to Bored Panda. So John moved into the family’s garage workshop and received a completely new identity. In Nathalie’s version of events, Uncle Murray used to be a scientist and, even as a skeleton, still loves life, along with jokes, kids, candy, safe explosions and anything pink. The character comes with a few quirks too: a pet dolphin that has supposedly been missing for two hundred years, and a lifelong struggle with stairs, which, by Murray’s own account, is exactly how he ended up like this. With AI as a creative helper, the young inventor wrote out the entire personality, then auditioned ten different voices before landing on the perfect one.
The 9-year-old mapped the wires with a multimeter, installed a cookie-sized computer brain and fitted everything inside the skeleton’s chest
Once the character was ready, the real engineering began. Armed with a multimeter, Nathalie opened up the animatronic and tested wire after wire to find the one that moves the arm and the one that lights up the eyes. Understanding how the original worked made the next step possible: connecting a Raspberry Pi, a tiny computer about the size of a cookie, to serve as Uncle Murray’s new brain. Wiring it in meant working through a serious tangle of cables, but the young builder took care of it before drilling the holes in the control box, fitting it neatly inside the ribcage and reassembling the skeleton piece by piece.
After hours of testing fixed his habit of talking too fast, Uncle Murray now answers visitors in about one second, with no script at all
Like most inventions, the first version didn’t go quite according to plan. The newly rebuilt skeleton rushed through every sentence and stopped paying attention to whoever was talking. Rather than giving up, father and daughter spent hours testing, tracking down one issue at a time until the conversations finally flowed, a milestone the family proudly marked as “ALIVE!!” Today, the process runs smoothly. When someone approaches the porch, a motion sensor wakes Uncle Murray up, the eyes begin to glow and a spooky greeting follows. A speakerphone picks up what visitors say, an AI (Claude, by Anthropic) decides how the character would respond, and the voice Nathalie chose delivers the reply while the jaw moves and an arm stirs the drink, all in roughly a second. Since nothing is scripted, one visitor might hear a skeleton joke, followed by Murray laughing at it, while the next gets the latest news about that long-lost dolphin.
In just over a month, the chatty skeleton has held more than 60 conversations, including a five-minute talk about gummy bears with Nathalie’s 4-year-old brother
Since mid-September, family members, friends, neighbors and kids walking past have all stopped by for a chat, and visitors of every age have been won over. Uncle Murray’s most loyal fan might be Nathalie’s little brother, who spent five whole minutes discussing gummy bears and his Woody costume with the skeleton. Several of these moments now live on Uncle Murray’s website, where short captioned videos capture real exchanges, including one about dolphins with Nathalie and another about a fish with no eye.
Nathalie also painted the sign, designed the website and is presenting Uncle Murray to her class ahead of his Halloween night debut on the porch
The wiring and testing were only part of the job, as Nathalie ran the whole project almost like a small business. A hand-painted sign now lets passersby know the skeleton is ready to talk, and a website designed by the 9-year-old gives anyone the chance to watch Uncle Murray in action. This month, the young inventor is introducing her creation to classmates, and on October 31, the chatty scientist takes his place on the porch to welcome trick-or-treaters. Visitors are asked to follow a few simple house rules: wait for the eyes to glow, share your costume, speak clearly, let Murray finish talking, and always say goodbye before leaving.