What’s spookier than the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Dundalk?

I’ll let you think about it. Ponder the giant “Golden Eggs,” often smelled before they’re seen.

Perhaps the only thing scarier than the facility itself is dressing up as the infamous — and stinky — treatment plant for Halloween.

Brandon Hartman, an Essex resident who owns Salty Dog’s Crab House Inc. in Dundalk, worked with his girlfriend, Erisa Qirici, to carefully craft a human-sized treatment plant to wear together.

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Hartman posted a photo on Facebook of their faces peeking out of the costume and it took off from there. As of Halloween afternoon, just four days after he posted the photo, it has more than 1,800 shares on Facebook.

Hartman said they wore the treatment plant costume at two back-to-back Halloween costume parties. And of course, they beat out 60 other costumes for first place in a costume contest.

Hartman said he sees the treatment plant pretty much daily because he drives to Dundalk for the restaurant.

“We just thought it would be a local, funny kind of thing. Never expected it to blow up the way it did,” he said. “It was just crazy.”

The Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant, with its iconic gold structures and ... notable smell, often catch attention online. Memes of the treatment plant make their rounds and someone even got a Disney-style tattoo of the treatment plant three years ago.

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Courtesy of MD. The "castle" is the Back River Waste Treatment Facility.
by u/Cyynric in ATAAE

For one week, the couple cut out and glued together dozens of chunks of cardboard to make the most realistic looking costume they could. The finishing touch was spray paint and stenciled diamonds on top to make the costume pop.

“Being that it’s the local, you know, poop plant, I just thought it would be funny if we made it pretty detailed and looked the way it did,” Hartman said.

For Halloween tonight, he said he and Qirici will make their rounds in the neighborhood once or twice for one last laugh.

And to forever hold onto the memory of dressing up as the “local poop plant,” Hartman said he will hang a photo of them wearing the costume in his restaurant.