Thread: Need Help ASAP

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Hello all,

Calling all ghouls, goblins and other Halloween freaks. I do a very large haunted house walk through at my home. I accept can food donations and give them to a local food bank. Things have been great the past 7 years. Last year we have had over 500 people come through. This year I have a problem. In the past I have had a cemetery around my front and side yards. I live on the corner. I have all nice cemetery fence I usually put up and it looks great. Well, last spring we decided to install new PVC white picket fence around my property. Well needless to say it doesn’t look scary at all and I can’t use my cemetery fence. I need ideas on how to make our new fence look disturbing with out altering the fence. Any suggestions???

Hang stuff off of it. Burlap, raffia, chains and such. Plastic vines and/or cheesecloth.

15# or 30# roofing paper... 15 should be enough, but depends on how windy it gets in your area and how much it might be touched etc. It's fairly cheap, get it at a building supply store. you can fold it over the top and staple, or run a piece along each side and staple them at the top. If you need to "weight down" the bottom, you can use light wood and staple to that, or if there is room at the base of the fence you could even staple to the under side of that. Even duct tape has a hard time sticking to the paper, so I use staples. Anyway, you can then use colored chalk and draw a very simple block design. Kind of like a dungeon wall look, and don't draw on entire thing, just a bit here and there. Your drawing doesn't have to be great, just a basic brick pattern but larger, and light gray or white lines, then use the side of the gray or dark gray even blue to add a little color and shape. Then cover with creepy cloth. I made it sound very involved, but really it is a simple, fast and fairly cheap effect. Plus you can roll the paper up at the end of the year if you want and use it again next year. You can also come up with different designs. You can wipe off any chalk drawing you don't like with a slightly dampened cloth. We used this to build a "wall" out of cardboard, covered it in paper and cloth and chalked on this way. It turned out really nicely. HTH

Terra has the right idea - I would think raffia or burlap with webs and other creepy things hanging from it would really help it to look scary.

You could put your cemetery fence a bit inside the boundary of the white fence and then fill in the gap with cornstalks, some scene setter stone wall effect or maybe just black plastic sheeting (attached to and covering the white fence), and also hang stuff on the fence like Terra suggested. You could also collect fallen branches and stick them in the ground between the two fences for creepy trees. The white fence would look untouched from the street side, but your TOTs walking through would still have the effect of the cemetery fence from inside the yard.

It's tricky. How high does your fence stand? I think it can still be spooky. I would add more bigger props to the yard to distract people from looking at the fence.

You could add blue lights, cheesecloth, black fabric, pumpkins, haybales, little things like that.

Best of luck. Is there anyway you could post a pic of the fence so we can think further more?

Beef Netting would be relatively cheap. You could backlight it in blacklight. It wouldn't harm the fence in anyway.