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5 Tips for Haunting Your House this Halloween

Fill Your Plate

10.29.2014

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Halloween is almost here and if you want to have the creepiest trick or treating house on the street, now is the time to get down to decorating. Here are some ghoulishly good tips for haunting up your house in time to give out candy.

1. Light Up the Night

Help trick-or-treaters navigate their way to your door by creating a path with Halloween themed luminaries. You can make the containers for your luminaries from a variety of materials including paper bags, empty milk jugs, or even tin cans. Create jack-o-lantern faces or ghostly scenes on your luminaries and place an electric candle or glowstick inside so that the light illuminates the pattern. Line your driveway and/or walkway with the luminaries to create a haunting path for the kids to take to get their candy.

2. Create Creatures in the Yard

With a little creativity, some old clothes, and a bit of chicken wire you can create everything from ghosts to witches to a ring of little monsters in the front yard. Use the chicken wire to create the shape of your creatures and dress them up appropriately. If you are making ghosts, toss a light stick inside the frame and see how they glow!

3. Make a Bunch of Mini Ghosts

You can create a ghostly tree or decorate your porch with a gaggle of mini-ghosts with some Styrofoam balls, cheesecloth, and fishing line. Wrap a piece of cheesecloth around a Styrofoam ball, punch a hole in the top and attach the fishing line, and hang wherever you want to create ghostly ambience.

4. Make a Jack-o-Lantern House

You can do this one of two ways. You can turn the entire house into a jack-o-lantern or you can turn each window into its own jack-o-lantern. To make a jack-o-lantern house, cut cardboard into the shapes for the eyes, nose, and mouth. Spray paint the cardboard black and outline the cardboard with orange lights. Hang the cardboard on the outside of the house to make the face. You can also do this on a smaller scale using the garage door. To make the windows into jack-o-lanterns, cut pieces of cardboard that will fit each window. Cut the eyes, nose, and mouth shapes out of the cardboard. Paint the cardboard orange and push it into the window. When the lights in the house are on, each window will look like a jack-o-lantern face.

You can make both of these even better by using orange light bulbs in all the outside lights.

5. Create a Creepy Cemetery

You don’t have to spend a ton of money on fake gravestones to turn your yard into a creepy cemetery. Simply cut tombstone shapes out of cardboard and paint with stone colored spray paint. Use black paint to decorate each gravestone and to bring your cemetery to life. You can up the creepy factor by hanging some cheesecloth ghosts from any trees or by spreading some fake bones throughout the scene. Backlight the tombstones with solar spotlights for a ghostly effect at night.