10 Ways to Haunt Your House

Halloween is fast approaching. You want your house to be the spookiest one on the block. Besides serving up full size candy bars, what are some ways your can spook out your home so the neighborhood kids remember it as their favorite haunted house for years to come?

1. Lights Out. Put your Christmas candles in each window but replace them with orange flickering light bulbs- available at craft stores.
2. Creepy Curtains. Take down or push aside your ‘regular’ curtains and add an old piece of cloth ‘tattered up’ to look spooky with those candles.
3. No One’s Home. When kids come to the door to trick or treat, don’t answer. Have someone in a scary mask run around from the side of the house to scare up some fun, then you can open the door and serve candy. Extra piece for the best screamers!
4. Fog It. Splurge on a fog machine this year. It creates a great spooky atmosphere around your home and you can use it year after year.
5. Organ Music. Careful choosing Halloween music- some of the tapes and CDs are both cheesy and annoying. Buy either Martha Stewart’s Halloween CD, Extreme Halloween (which has real horror movie themes from Psycho, etc) or something by Midnight Syndicate. Any of these will sound spooktacular coming out from a window or from behind a bush.
6. Porch Lights. Replace regular bulbs with yellow bug lights or purple black lights to give an eerie effect to your door.
7. Graveyard. You can make your own, but nowadays the fake gravestones are super cheap at Walmart or Kmart or other stores. Kids love a good graveyard- don’t forget a few things ‘climbing’ out of the grave. Make sure your fog machine fogs the cemetery.
8. Ghostly silhouettes. Simply by cutting black poster board into ghost or other Halloween shapes you can create black shadows to appear in your windows. You can also buy eyes and other spooky shadows to hang in windows.
9. Spider Webs. Cheap, easy, effective. Drape them everywhere. Make your trick or treaters walk through them to get to the door. Don’t forget the plastic spiders.
10. Dress It Up. Dress in scary costumes to give out candy. Really scary masks are great to spook the kids. Have a table with the candy on it, with a hole in the table and what looks like a fake head, someone can open their eyes and scare the heck out of the kids. Or a ‘headless’ person holding the candy holding still until a kid comes and you move and scare them.

Most of all Halloween is about fun! Kids love a good haunted house on Halloween.

Spook On!