Looking for a good scream this Halloween but trying to reduce your carbon footprint? It’s easy to turn your house into a haunted mansion without having to drop the big bucks or scare mother nature in the process. Try some of these fun and easy tips to help make your house the scariest (and greenest) haunt in the neighborhood!
- Set an eerie ambiance with eco-friendly candles (soy or beeswax), LED lights, or flash lights powered with rechargeable batteries
- Give your candles added Halloween flare by cutting out patterns in a paper bag to create luminaries, adding some sand to the bottom for stability and placing a votive candle in the center
- Use the garage, shed or deck as your house of horror. It might not look like a haunted house now, but you can transform it.
- strobe and black lights can make for an eerie scene, but you can also use solar-powered garden lights or homemade mason jar luminaries to illuminate the entrance to doom. Then enhance railings, steps and windows with solar-powered orange LED lights.
- Make a graveyard out of old cereal boxes turned gravestones. Or, transform recycled cardboard into coffins, chains, or skeletons by cutting them to your own design and painting them with non-toxic paint
- Reuse old costumes to create dummies — stuff them with newspaper or towels. By attaching the stand-ins to a simple pulley system, you can make them move and fly across the group of visitors. If you’re going to have live volunteers as well, have them reuse costumes instead of wearing new ones.
- Use old bed sheets or pillowcases to make ghosts by stuffing a t-shirt into the center and tying it off with a ribbon to create the head.
- Add drama with eye-catching props. Design monsters and graveyard scenes with extra paint supplies and cardboard. Surplus wood and rope can be turned into a hanging noose.
- Decorate the scene with blood made form ketchup or better yet, simple syrup mixed with food coloring.
- Make paper chains out of old newspaper for a dangerous dungeon feel
- Create hair-raising sounds by having live volunteers rattling chains, moaning and screaming. Instead of replaying a recording, each visitor’s experience will be unique.
- Roll old newspaper into a cone shape and paint it black to make a wicked witch’s hat
- Use white spray paint to transform old stockings and the netting from orange bags into creepy cobwebs for your corners
- Cut up egg cartons to create bats or pumpkins
- Use old household items to make a scary skeleton mobile
- Give new life to plastic milk jugs with just a little paint to make a jack-o-lantern
- Paint spooky Halloween murals on your windows with non-toxic window paint
- Decorate with gourds, pumpkins, apples and other edible items that you can eat once the night is over
- Gather leaves and branches from the backyard to help make your home have the awesome, ramshackle appeal ; )
Here’s hopin’ for an eerily eco Halloween!
