Thread: Abandoned house

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Hey everyone,

I need your help. I'm thinking that this year's Halloween party will be a vacant/abandoned house theme. Dust, cobwebs, old furniture covered by drop clothes/bedsheets.

I need help aging the sheets that will be covering all the furniture as well as your opinion on what you think you'd see in an old vacant house.

I'll be doing the broken plaster wall effect using the woodgrain contact paper and will be doing my thunder/lightning fx again this year as well.

So what else would you expect to see and how would you accomplish it?

Thanks in advance!!

I always forget to take good pictures of my setup, but we pretty much do "haunted house" every year. Check out my albums to see if anything floats your boat.

Sheets don't necessarily have to be aged - plain white sheets (pick them up at the thrift store) work out just fine. I do them on all of the furniture and it definitely gets the abandoned house effect. If you really want to age them, using sandpaper to fray the edges, and you can also start a cut and then rip them along the edges. Teastaining would work to get an old stained effect as well.

Cobwebs. LOTS of cobwebs. You can get a webshooter/webcaster gun (requires a compressor and glue sticks) if you are careful with the surfaces that you use this on, it looks amazing. You'll need to test things like furniture and wall surfaces since it IS gluesticks... don't want to ruin something for an effect!

OR you could use the plain old web in a bag. You'll need to put up anchors along walls and such to attach the webbing, and the thinner and more anchors you use, the more realistic it will look. I've used tiny finishing nails, pushpins the same color as the wall paint, and natural anchors like windowsills, curtain rods and corners of furniture.

Don't dust. Not at all, and for at least a month. A true hardship if you're a neatfreak, but dusty surfaces are common in old abandoned houses. I've even used talcum powder on dark wood surfaces to simulate dust.

Cheesecloth. Available at fabric and home improvement stores, this stuff can be shredded, holes popped into it and dyed and then use it over light fixtures, furniture and hanging from doorways. I've even used it as curtains. Drape in doorways with shredded tendrils hanging down as a room divider.

Candle holders. Check out your local thrift stores and keep an eye out for silver candlestick holders and candelabras. Nothing says old fashioned like some guttered candles in a tarnished candelabra.

Control your lighting. Remove "modern" looking lamps and don't use any overhead lighting. Replace bulbs with purple or orange ones and don't use too many of those for a dimly lit room (not so much that you can't see - just don't have it brightly lit as that really ruins the effect).

Dead flowers and old portraits. Dusty old flower arrangements of decaying flowers and framed sepia toned or black and white images go REALLY far in setting the tone. Plus, it's really easy to get dead flowers. Just let 'em die. Portraits are pretty easy as well. Search out images on the web and print them out and if you're lucky you may already have some frames to use for them. Use toned paper or dye it yourself if you want to get a old, warped effect using a cake pan with water and tea or coffee grounds. Just make sure that the prints are laser and not inkjet which will run in water.

The MOST IMPORTANT THING to set the scene in my opinion... remove all of your knick-knacks, family stuff and general decor that DOES NOT FIT THE THEME. If it doesn't look old and can't be hidden by artful draping of cloth or other halloween decor - get it out of the room if at all possible. The more stuff that is removed, the more "abandoned" it will look and the few pieces of decor that you use will really pop.

I aged our tattered curtains in half tea and half coffee. The cloth was so tattered that the tea didn't do much to it the first time around.

We did an old house house theme that transitioned into a swamp / crashed pirate ship in the garage. (We couldn't decide which theme to do, so we did both.) In the house, we did lots of subtle things that worked well:

- Lots of very thin cobwebs. We tried to make them look natural instead of like a movie-set spider lair.

- Tilted all of the pictures on the walls just a little.

- Hid the TV, stereo, and as many of the other electronics that we could.

- Used black and red window markers (basically dry erase markers) to draw red eyes, mustaches, and fangs on all of the kid's baby pictures hanging on the walls. They looked evil! Took people a while before they realized what was wrong with them.

- Many vases of dead flowers / weeds from the back yard. We covered most of them with webs also.

- A haunted bookshelf like Maureen built in this thread: Haunted Bookshelf A video of mine is on the 4th page or so. It took an hour before anyone noticed and the person that did screamed because she thought a book was going to hit her in the head.

- Lots of flicker lights / candles.


Right after the party, we wrote down things that we wanted to change for next year:

- Replacing the lightbulbs on the main floor of the house with 20 and 40 watt bulbs. It won't matter how many lights people turn on, it will stay fairly dark and creepy. Nothing like someone flicking on the main family room lights and ruining the mood! That happened several times last year.

- Figure out a way to make the chandeliers swing back and forth on their own.

- Board up the windows with fake boards.

- Do more outside stuff to set the mood before people get to the front door. We did nothing outside last year.

- Frame a few more old creepy portraits to hang on the walls. I'm going to play around with ripping the eyes out of one and painting glow in the dark eyes behind the sockets so it looks like someone is behind it.

Thanks everyone! Some great ideas. Now to put it into practice.

It all depends on if you want it to look like it was abandoned in a hurry or just left and might be used again. The covered furniture means someone will be back. Old rotten food on the kitchen table with the chairs tipped over like they ran out is another. You could put a dead cat or dog on a chain in the kitchen like they forgot to grab him on the way out. Cockroaches if you use the food method. The power would be off in either case so you would want to give your guests little flashlights. This makes it even scarier for them because, they only can see a little bit at a time and the anxiety level rises. They never know what they are going to see next or if someone is going to jump out from behind a covered chair.