Halloween Haunted House Ideas

Set Up Your Own Terrifying Tour With Easy, Simple Effects

© Diane Laney Fitzpatrick

Aug 30, 2007

Halloween is the season when kids love to be scared, spooked and startled.

This season, get your children and their friends involved in creating a Halloween haunted house for the whole neighborhood.

Coming up with ideas, building it and performing the roles in a haunted house is as much fun for kids – particularly teen-agers – as walking through it.

Invite your children’s friends from school and the neighborhood as an alternative to trick-or-treat, or have a haunted house as part of your drop-in Halloween party after trick-or-treating.

Have a guide take small groups through the haunted house, narrating as they go. If there are young children in a group, the narrator can give a pre-arranged signal to the performers to lay off the scary stuff.

Lighting is your most effective special effect. Use flashlights, red light bulbs, green spotlights and night lights to create low lighting that is safe enough to move around, but which highlights the scary things on your tour.

Here are some simple ideas for rooms in your haunted house:

Dracula’s Lair

Someone dressed in a vampire costume lies in a coffin, which you can build from a large cardboard box cut and formed to a coffin-like shape and painted black. As guests walk by, the vampire suddenly opens his eyes, sits up and bares his fangs.

Mad Scientist’s Lab

Gather up all your old science fair equipment, beakers and tubes from the microscope set, and anything in your kitchen that resembles a scientist’s lab. The performer wears a white, wild-hair wig and a lab coat. A fake head or a full-faced mask stuffed with newspaper can sit on a table nearby.

Witch’s Room

For an eerie witch’s cauldron, fill a black, plastic Halloween cauldron with hot water and add dry ice and a glow stick. (Don’t let children handle or get near the dry ice.) Your performer, dressed in the traditional witch regalia, is at the cauldron, stirring and telling a scary story.

Frankenstein’s Workshop

Yucky body parts are easy to mimic, using spaghetti, peeled grapes and other foods. Set aside part of your haunted house to have guests put their hands in these slimy, gooey and scary things while the performer tells the story of Hal O’Ween.

“Dead” bodies can be lying nearby, made by setting up stuffed clothing, shoes, and a full-face mask. Ketchup is a good alternative to fake blood, but it smells like you’re having a barbecue.

Ghostly Graveyard

Set up gravestones (large cereal boxes painted gray and marked with black letters) in a dark room. Add a fog machine (available at rental stores and for sale with the fog juice for about $40) for a spooky effect. If your haunted house is outdoors, tiki torches stuck in the ground along the path will create an eerie effect.

Words of Warning

• Dry ice can instantly burn the skin and should be handled only by an adult. It should never be left unattended where a child could mistake it for a chip of regular ice. Don’t ever put dry ice into a beverage. If ingested it can cause serious burns.

• Kids love the surprise of uncovering a covered platter and finding what looks like a real head sitting on a platter. Don’t create this illusion by pushing two tables together with someone’s neck in between, with their head sticking above the tables. The tables can be accidentally pushed together, resulting in serious injury.

• If you’re using strobe lights in your haunted house, be aware that they can trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy, a rare condition but one that is found mainly in young people.

Back Yard Haunted House

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