Halloween House Decorations

Halloween house decorations can turn any home into a haunted home during this holiday. You can get in the ghastly spirit of the holiday by adding some spooky, eerie or gross details to the home. What other time of year would you invite rats and bats indoors or make the effort to create a final resting place for dead bodies in your back yard? So live it up by celebrating the dead, or un-dead, and add some flair to your Halloween haunted lair.

Halloween House Decorations for a Haunted Home

Honestly, these days it is almost impossible to narrow down the choices of how to decorate your home for Halloween. We’ve come a long way from just the simple paper cutouts that hang on a door or wall. These days, homes can come alive with the undead and macabre fairly simply. It really all depends on how much or how little you want to decorate.

One of the easiest ways to add little touches of a fear factor to the home is by adding plenty of fake vermin. Those critters you spend money having exterminators keeping out of the home, you can now add with great enthusiasm. Plastic spiders, roaches and rats can be scattered about a room to add some yuck. Of course, do not use the little critter décor if you have little ones or pets as these can be choking hazards.

Add fake cob webs to corners and ghosts suspended from the ceiling. Ghosts can be created by using sheets, pillowcases or white trash bags. Simply lightly stuff with paper, close off with wire, string or rubber bands and hang for some scare factor. Remember to use caution and never hang anything too close to a light fixture or ceiling fan. To go all out, check out your local party supply store. There are plenty of monsters and other details you can add to up the amount of ghoulish delight you want in your haunted house.

Not so Scary Options

Halloween doesn’t have to be just about ghosts, goblins, demons and the undead. Halloween house decorations can also be selected to offer more of a seasonal theme than a haunted appeal. So think fall, instead of fear.

Pumpkins still add holiday finesse, only this time they don’t require any carving. In fact some gourds of all sizes, shapes and colors can really make a home look festive for this holiday. Of course that also means adding some hay to the look. You can put cloth or plastic on the floor and then use hay bales for décor or even seating. Make sure to use some loose bits around the room as well.

Apples and dried corn also add some festive holiday flavor to a room. If you’re really feeling in the spirit of things, you can also incorporate a scarecrow into your decorating and take it that extra step. Use some paper leaves to create an ambiance of fall, not just Halloween.

Crafty Ideas

Using homemade crafts to decorate for Halloween can be budget friendly and good for the whole family to get involved. Use some ideas you find to work together on a larger project or to create smaller individual pieces. A family sign is a good DIY project.

You can create one sign that everyone contributes to, or signs for each person to have on the door to their bedroom. You can also create one to hang outside. Go with either an autumn look or a haunted theme and color or decorate as you please. You can, in fact, take the eerie idea even farther by creating signs that look like tombstones.

You can also create holiday themed mobiles as part of your Halloween house decorations for inside the home. Again, family members can work together on one or create individual mobiles for different areas of the house. Use paper, felt, cloth, markers, glitter, glue and anything else you can think of to make a mobile. You can use patterns or stencils or do it all freehand.

Cut out drawings for younger kids and let them color with crayons. Once you have a collection of black cats, pumpkins, ghosts, bats and witches, create your mobile. You can use a coat hanger for better support if needed, and remember to make the top of the mobile larger than the pieces hanging from it.

Look online or do some party store browsing to get some ideas and inspiration. Make what you can and buy what you can’t. Either way, your Halloween house decorations will be sure to get your whole family in the spirit of the holiday.

Many people keep certain holiday decorations from year to year, then add new ones. There’s the Christmas tree, ornaments for that, and perhaps a few well decorated and artificial pumpkins, Jack O’ Lanterns, and large black spiders for Halloween. Families often have a pumpkin carving fest and kids get a real kick out of creating those transitory pumpkins which are great for a week, then soften into a green and malodorous puddle when they start to decay. There’s room for permanent and temporary decorations for all seasons and holidays.

Craft stores have numerous basic pumpkin shapes made from either Paper Mache or Syrofoam Where these types shine is in a lovely mantel or window display which you can make yourself. After Halloween or Thanksgiving is over, pop the display into a plastic bag and seal it up, then store in a dry place. Dried gourds can also be used but they are nature’s own and eventually will deteriorate. For the mantel or window display, measure your space and cut a length of board to fit. Cover it neatly and totally with brown felt (fabric store) and fasten to board in back and at ends, kind of like a long, skinny package.

Choose either a few differently sized pumpkins and fall “greenery” and small picks with scarecrows on them etc., or a few Jack O’ Lanterns and black cats and a haunted house pick or two. One can be for Thanksgiving or you can do a combo. If there is an outlet near to where you are displaying the pumpkin diorama, then string some mini orange or purple lights along it and plug in. This is great for a front window. Don’t forget to turn the lights off at night or if you are out.

Haunted houses are popular at Halloween so you can create one in your own home, or even perhaps just the entryway. This will use several components which can be packed away or discarded each year when Halloween is over with. That stretchy spider web material is great for corners and very realistic. Guests may even think it’s real! In a dark upper corner you can place a large black spider and one of those that is animated and has glowing red eyes is super freaky and kids get a real kick out of them. Other rubber or plastic spiders can be placed around various locations, but make sure that pets don’t get hold of them as they can swallow them, and may get sick.

A favorite each year is a candy or treat bowl, so purchase a large black cauldron (plastic is fine or else it will weigh a ton), and if you can get s small electric glowing fire simulator and place it under the cauldron, so much the better. When Halloween comes you can place some dry ice hidden in your display so it seems to be bubbling over. Be careful about the dry ice as it can freeze the skin so keep it sway from treats. You can set up your cauldron and put treats in front of it as this would be the safest method.

Always think safety of children, adults and pets first on Halloween, whenever you make a decoration or wear a costume. It’s a fun time and kids love to dress up. There are realistic skeletons on the Web and also in some pop-up Halloween stores. They are usually molded from plastic and some can be inexpensive but the most realistic ones are expensive. They will last a long time so think if you’d like to invest in one. You can hang one from a chandelier if you have a very high ceiling, like the one in Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

An incredibly inventive scene and one which will be talked about in the neighborhood, is if you have a cubicle in your house or a very small room, you can create a Halloween scene in it – graveyards are popular, then stretch a scrim (muslin) cloth across the front which will screen off the room. When lit, people will see the scene suddenly and have a great time laughing about how it made them jump out of their skins! This is exactly how it’s done in the theatre and you can make these scenes fairly easily. An old fashioned parlor with a skeleton sitting in a rocking chair, a dusty tiffany lamp, and spooky music playing is a good scene to start with. If you can get the rocker to rock back and forth, then so much the better.

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Halloween Decorations

Halloween House Decorations

Halloween House Decorations