LEWISTON – His favorite holidays were Christmas and Halloween, and Rocky Palmisano always lit them up with over-the-top yard displays.

Palmisano believed in the wow factor. Five-foot tall vampires. Reindeer carousels. Giant snow globes with moving parts.

When he died unexpectedly in a car accident last year, Miriam Silva inherited her baby brother’s collection.

She didn’t share his hobby – or taste – but decided immediately to put everything up in his honor outside her Sabattus Street home.

While they hung lights, “We would look up to the sky and say, ‘Rocky, do you approve?'” Silva, 44, said. “I just let my brother guide it. I’ve never (decorated) before. Even my neighbors are like, ‘What got into her?'”

Palmisano was 36 years old when he died. He lived in Lisbon, then Lewiston, and worked as a cook at Governor’s restaurant. Silva helped raise him. The pair were very close.

“He was awesome. He was fun. I used to hang out with him everyday,” said Silva’s son, Chris Grover.

On her steep yard, where traffic whizzes by, she’s staked down big inflatable Santas, snowmen and reindeer, and trimmed her porch in lights.

Silva added a giant Santa riding a motorcycle after she found a picture of one in his belongings.

At Halloween, she had a big globe of ghosts, the vampire and other decor.

“Normally, nobody even comes out trick or treating this way,” Silva said. But since she started with the big display, they’ve come.

That first Halloween after Palmisano’s death, she decorated his grave at Broadview Memorial on East Avenue with light-up pumpkins, cobwebs, spiders and a loud “booo-ing” motion sensor that gave cemetery workers a start.

“They went to do the lawn and it spooked them, so they called me and said, ‘Let me know next time.'”

She has decorated his grave for Christmas this year, too, with angels, a poinsettia with leaves dipped in sparkle and a tiny tree. He doesn’t have a headstone yet. She stuck a white wooden sign in the ground, “Rocky S. Palmisano, 1969-2005, Love, Mom, Sister.”

Standing on her lawn at dusk, surveying the lights and moving bits, Silva said she’s made a promise. She’ll keep putting these up for Rocky until she can’t anymore.

“My brother would have done it so much better,” she said.

“He’s probably laughing at me because I used to tell him, ‘You’re going a little overboard.'”