Thread: School Haunt - Need Ideas, Advice, Tips - HELP!

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OK, here is the situation. I've been handed the task of setting up a "Haunted House" for an elementary school carnival. Great, right? Well, there are a lot of stigmas attached to this.

I'll have a huge space to fill - what's known as a quad - four linked classrooms.
I won't have access to the rooms until Friday after school and the Haunt is Saturday morning (Oct 27th).
The classrooms are in use and have teacher/student material up that must remain in place. (I can't strip the room).
I've already asked, and there are no dividers or false walls available.
No weapons of any kind - school policy.
Can't be too scarey. (Does anyone have a "Scarey meter"?)
Virtually no budget. The school itself cannot give money, but the Booster club can. However, I know they don't have much money.

I'm looking for all and any suggestions on how to pull this off.

Some of my ideas include: Making each room a theme - Since I won't be able to wall up a huge maze throughout the four rooms.
Making use of tarps and drop cloths for some walls and covering up existing bulletin boards.
Having hands-on stations (Witch theme with jars of eyeballs (olives), worms (spaghetti), etc.)
Maybe even getting a jumper/bouncer in a room for a Space/Alien theme.
Perhaps a "Lights On" session for the little ones, though since the Haunt will be run during the day, it'll be hard to black out these rooms to begin with.

Why would I even want to get involved in this?

I grew up in the Midwest and moved to SoCal as an adult. Talk about polar opposites in the celebration of Halloween! I know this has been discussed before, so I'll just add this: I'm thrilled that this school is breaking out of restraints placed on them and doinging something for all the kids to enjoy.

Please Respond - I know it's long, but I need the HELP!

Maybe make the classrooms work for you. Have one room as "Zombie School" filled with living (and dead - prop) zombies. Have a Zombie teacher showing the class what's expected of them - what to eat, what NOT to eat, Could even do a zombie shuffle lesson, ala "Shaun of the Dead".

In another classroom have a Wizard's school using Harry Potter as inspiration.



You could play with the type of class - Home Ecchh!, Phy-sicks, Ge-UGH!rophy,
Algae-bra, ...

Good luck!

I really like the Hogwarts idea. Use the school stuff to your advantage, plus the kids will like it cos it's something they know about. Maybe one room/area could be for games. There are lots of Halloween party games on the internet and you could do some of them to fill space and keep some kids busy.

Ohh, a zombie teacher, what fun. My daughter works at a library, and was a zombie librarian. She found a prop at one of the halloween stores, not sure which one, that was a pencil sticking out of her head, with bugs in her hair, etc. She had alot of fun with it, and a teacher would be great also. Maybe use tarps to darken the rooms? A spiders lair could probably be done fairly inexpensively, and would be creepy, scarey, with out being too much so. Do you have any props available, your own, or know where to borrow some? I think it is awesome a school having a haunted house!!

Thank you to those that have responded (I was getting down after seeing 25 views and no replies).

Harry Potter Room = Great Idea... I think I'll have some Dementors come into play

Game room is another good idea - maybe at the end and even incorporate it with the bouncer. We attended the ElCapitan Premier of "The Haunted Mansion" when it came out and after the movie you could walk the set on a back lot. They had a black light game room that included ping pong tables marked in a Checker Board pattern - BUT some of the Black Squares were really holes!.

I have several basic props of my own - Strobe lights, black lights, foggers, spirit ball, and other decorations.

I was thinking of using some tarps and line to segment one of the rooms for a maze and using garbage bags or construction paper for the windows.

Info or tips on a Spider's Lair?

I am in virtually the same situation as you, except I only have two locker rooms to turn into a haunted house for a carnival. The budget usually only runs from between $100-$200, so I end up making a majority of my own things. I have found that lots of stuffed dummies made of old clothes and newspaper can add a lot, especially one suspended from the ceiling where shoelaces would trail over heads in the dark, it was great! I think a number of good volunteers is definitely key, I never seem to have enough volunteers! As for the scare meter, we try to have our guide put the little ones together and warn all the actors that little ones are coming through and to tone it down a tad.
This year, I was planning to build some simple dividers out of wood and black plastic to create more separate rooms. We're going with a cursed high school theme. There will be biology class (autopsy room with a fake bloody torso and real actor being operated on), library (with dead body props stamped OVERDUE in red, scattered old books and magazines and a serial killer librarian), a cafeteria (serving human bar-b-que), principal's office (torture chamber), detention (rotting bodies chained to a wall in a cemetery) and a dead ghoul dance coming alive to attack the visitors during a seance to "save" their souls. My kicker will be a huge man dressed as the grim reaper as a truant officer. Good luck!

I like some of these other ideas, especially Ariadnae's . Hope these help to get the creative juices flowing!

I just saw a "Haunted House Kit" at Spirit for 20 bucks, not sure if it would be worth it but if you're on a budget it might do in a pinch! You can see it on the website.

A spider lair is extremely easy and cheap... Im doing one this yr....LOTS of cheap web and a blucky skelly wrapped up like a cocoon with a big hairy spider hanging on him... scattered some plastic flies, lil spiders and bugs in the web. We took a big tree branche and covered it in web also and hung our 'spider victim' in it.. I'll upload a pic and post a link...

It needs more web so the 2nd spider will show up better but itll give you general idea
http://www.geocities.com/tammy_renea1970/misc.html