SALEM — The easy part of the trip is the five-hour drive from New Jersey. The hard part is unpacking.

John Marsicano, a 51-year-old deputy sheriff from Edison, N.J., and his wife, Karen McCrory, a 51-year-old operations specialist at UPS, arrived at the Hawthorne Hotel late on the afternoon of Oct. 20.

They spent the next 21âÑ2 hours unloading plastic bins and boxes from the large cargo van they rented. Inside were Halloween decorations — hundreds and hundreds of Halloween decorations. There were cat pillows, black bats, dangling spiders, flying witches, skull beer steins, handmade brooms, a werewolf alarm clock and Charlie Brown pumpkin posters.

"I stopped decorating at 4 a.m.," Marsicano said of that first night in Salem.

The next day, he spent another eight hours hooking up strings of lights from one side of the hotel room to the other and taking care of little details, like hanging a ghost from the ceiling and attaching a cackling green witch to the door.

For this extreme hotel makeover, they even bring along their own stepladders.

Marsicano and McCrory have been coming to the Hawthorne Hotel since 1997. They started with a few decorations and kept adding more and more.

Marsicano said he doesn't know how many Halloween decorations there are but conceded the number is in the hundreds.

"The Halloween tree alone has 38 ornaments," he said, pointing to a 2-foot-tall tree on a bed stand next to an orange bubble light with eight glowing pumpkins.

Although the hotel staff has seen most of it before, they still get excited every October.

"We get a knock on the door every once in a while and it's one of the desk people," Marsicano said. "Or room service will come up and say, 'We don't have anything for your room, but can we take a peek?'"

It is hard to describe this room. Almost every inch is covered with something having to do with Halloween, from handmade pillows McCrory quilted to their first purchase, a plastic pumpkin.

They even bring their own bedspreads. One has a headless Jack Skellington, the protagonist from Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas." Snuggled on the same bed between cat pillows is Woof-Woof, Eddie Munster's werewolf doll from the television show "The Munsters."

Marsicano and McCrory come by this Halloween passion naturally.

Both are classic horror movie buffs and collectors. She collects teddy bears and coffee cups — "I must have 2,000 coffee cups by now," she said. He is a Revolutionary War and Civil War re-enactor who collects drinking steins and Civil War memorabilia.

Once they started buying Halloween art and decorations, they couldn't stop. They make several trips to Salem every year and buy stuff almost everywhere they go.

Among the more unusual items is a skeleton made of papier-mâché pumpkin parts. "I found that in Peddler's Village, Pennsylvania," Marsicano said.

The Hawthorne Hotel warmly welcomes the couple every year, and even featured them on the hotel blog. And even though one hotel room gets turned into a Disney exhibit every October, it is always left in good shape.

"They are so respectful of the hotel," said Juli Lederhaus, the general manager. "When they check out, you cannot tell there was one additional thing on the walls. ... I'm happy to have guests like that."

The New Jersey couple said it's hard to explain their Halloween hotel passion, but it has something to do with the fun they experience in Salem, the friends they have made here and the joy they feel bringing Halloween with them to America's Halloween city.

"This is a unique town," McCrory said.

Marsicano nodded in agreement. "The environment of the town inspired us to do what we're doing."