Thread: creepy house ideas

Tweet

besides the good old fashioned ideas of covering furnature with white sheets, flour all over everything for "dust" and spiderwebs all around the house, what else can be done?
for the diningroom i will have old tarnished silver trays and servers and a punch bowl and a candle obra

what about putting up shadow people. ghosts. lots of spiders

suspend some faux candles with "invisible string" so they seem to float.

good ideas, keep em comming please.....as for the candles i did see that idea too and LOVE IT

am going to deco. the kitchen like a bloody butcher shop where all the yummmmmy food is comming from

for my party last Halloween I had different colored lighting in each room. I made my pictures crooked. I made curtains out of black tablecovers in every doorway and had them to the ground with tie-backs. If you check out my albums you will see more ideas. I just love decorating the inside for Halloween. Don't forget about your props and tombstones to. Love all the ideas ya get from a thread like this.

For my costume party last year, I decorated my bathroom like a murder scene. Had a bloody shower curtain with a red mini strobe light behind it (real fun walking into that when you're drunk lol). I also had bloody hand clings on the mirror, a toilet lid cling that was a zombie hand coming out to grab you, and a hand & foot above the toilet. Wasn't too extravigant but pretty cool.

great ideas everyone... thanx for getting the juices flowing lol.......... i guess i had a brain fart and couldnt quite figure out how to get started on planning the deco lol
more .. more... give me more PLEASE

2 big things that will dramatically change your house interior:

Get all of your normal decorations and knick-knacks and put them in a closet. It's totally cool if you like sports memorabilia or have a collection of beer mugs on the mantle, but having normal stuff out in what is supposed to be a creepy old house doesn't hit the right note. So take down all the smiling family pics and stuff. (or creep them up!)

Lighting. Open flames are a bit dangerous if you have a crowd, so use these with caution. Get the party bulbs (red, orange and purple are my faves - candle light is an orange-yellow so I do tend to use more of the orange) and remove most of your lights and just have a few around the areas with these bulbs or with battery-op candles in creepy holders. The party bulbs generally tend to be equivilent to 40 watts, so they are low light, and the color will automatically make things look just a bit more creepy than white lights. DO NOT USE OVERHEAD LIGHTING. If you have a living room ceiling fan, don't bother changing them out - just leave them off. Overhead lighting - unless it's from a chandieler that you can switch out the bulbs on and drape cheesecloth/webs over isn't "scary" at all. It will not cast good shadows, and it will severely limit the creepy effect if you use it.


This is a good example of what I mean. This lamp (a genuine antique that I got for free on Freecycle cause the top globe had broken) has a 25 watt bulb (regular white light, but it's really dim compared to normal lighting AND the blood drips on the globe turn the light ruddy). I usually have a regular table lamp and some normal stuff on that table, but I removed all of it and put a creepy little arrangement there instead. The book is a collection of gravestone epitaphs. This looks brighter than it was but it was a nice creepy little area.

OTHER STUFF:
You can do dried flower arrangements (I go get old looking vases and either use as is or spraypaint black and use dead flowers - I buy wilty flowers from the grocery well before the party and just don't put them in water so they are nice and dead ) and buy as much cheesecloth as you can stand and use a tea stain on it, shred it and use it to drape over tables, in doorways, as "curtains" that are falling apart... really this stuff is pretty awesome. I hang it from my ceiling fan and dining room light even if I don't use the lights themselves for a decaying drapery.

Print out some old photos and put them in cheapy frames you can find at thrift shops. I again age those with black spray paint. If you have some family photos, just printing them out in black and white and putting them into your existing frames (draping them with cheesecloth or webbing) will creep them up nicely.

I am always on the lookout at thrift stores and dollar stores for things that could be creeped out. I've also had good luck at garage sales - found a cutsy brass bird cage (not a real cage, just a decoration) and used black spraypaint on it to lightly spatter it to look tarnished and then had a flock of ravens perched all around it with a dollar store hand hanging out. Found one of those white plaster columns and again with the paint made it old and used it to display a JoL. Got a taxidermied puffer fish and made a fake museum mount and a aged label. Even found a skeletonized version of Billy Bass and he is AWESOME without even being on. Really just look for stuff that is weird and if it can be aged or painted with black spray paint... it might be a keeper.

Most of the stuff in this pic is either from yard sales, clearanced for being slightly messed up (thus really cheap) or handmade (that spellbook was an awesome Secret Reaper gift!)

I don't think I'd use flour to simulate dust. I just stop dusting the month before. Rather clean that after the party than worry about food stuff being all over the house.

Oh - and anything permanently part of the structure that looks really out of place in a haunted creepy old house - try to come up with something that can disguise it to make it blend in. My house was build in the 1980s and has that bar passthrough from the kitchen to the living room and really annoyed me since we started having a party, so I made a bar-soleum crypt front to fit in that space and made the bar's counter the little spot where you put flowers, offerings and candles burned "in remembrance" of the dearly departed. You could also do this (stack them top to bottom) for a doorway you want to block off or in front of something else you'd like to hide from view....


Still arranging stuff so this is a bit cluttered, but you get the idea... and the stereo stuff was covered up with cheesecloth for the party.

There is so much more I want to do for party prep, but I tend to run out of time and energy unfortunately, so each year I add a little more cool creepy stuff and get a little bit closer to the really spooky old house look.

Awesome displays Frankie's Girl

frankies girl, i love what you've done with the place. and i agree with open flames and flour. 2 do not dos. one thing i am going to try this year, i am going to put flicker bulbs in my ceiling fan, then i am going to take some white cardboard ghosts the size of the fan blades i got awhile back from currant, and attach them to the blade, and have them going in circles. they would also be easy to make. one could also wrap gauze material around chairs so it looks ghostly.