Thread: Help with Haunted Basement/Yard

Tweet

Halloween has really died down in my neighborhood and I've been desperately trying to use Voodoo to revive it. I'm wanting to do some sort of haunted basement and yard to get the local kids more interested in getting out and trick or treating.
Unfortunately I'm on my own with setting it up since my mother has become a Halloween Grinch.
I want to do something in our basement since it's already pretty creepy. It sort looks like it should belong to a serial killer since it's mostly concrete and it has a drain in the middle of the floor. There are two tiny windows and spider webs all over the place so decorating is almost finished.
I'm trying to figure out how I could properly utilize the space. My basement is roughly 36x43ft min. it's connected by an old door to our neighbors side that around 24ft and they have a door that leads outside. I asked and they'd be willing to let me use there side that has an outside door as the entrance. I just want to find a way to turn my basement into something a little more terrifying with a maze of some sort or perhaps a lab with some oddities.
We also have a fairly large yard with huge trees; so I'm thinking that would make a good space for something scary as well.
All ideas are helpful and keeping it on a budget but still really neat is what I'm going for. I've never set up a haunted basement/yard so I'm not sure what I should do with the space I have.

Is it possible to post some pix of your basement? That would help greatly in coming up with ideas on utilizing the space.

It sounds like the perfect setting for Dr Frankensteins lab to me with maybe a graveyard outside under the trees and the scaffold outside, noose still swinging where he acquired the body for his monster. Watch the original b and w movie, at the beginning he is trying to find a suitable body and I think theres a skull stuck on a stake in the graveyard too. When I read your post Frankenstein is what immediately came to mind. Hope its helpful.

Ooh you could put some stocks outside too. Make it a graveyard specifically for the burial of criminals, you could even have Burke and Hare out there, digging up bodies?

Check out Noah Fentz's stuff, at www.thecreepyhousenextdoor.com. Awesomeness, almost looks like the kind of haunt a serial killer would build!

I like the Frankenstein idea. Or maybe a Vlad the Impaler type theme. I've never seen a yard filled with impaled bodies which personally would scare me.

Your conundrum is how scarey do you want to make it. If you are attempting to attract 10-15 year olds, then you want it a little scarier, with some blood and body parts. If you are going for little tots, you don't want to scare the begezus out of them. I like the idea of Frank, or maybe like crazy neighbor. You can get body parts on the cheap, fake blood, bloodstained sheets. If you could find a metal table on the cheap, put some knives or saws on it, that would creep em out. Your yard sounds like a perfect cemetery scene. Terra has a great tutorial on homemade tombstones. Good luck. I know the feeling of ToTing dying slowly.

I started to do the Vlad the Impaler theme last year, but figured no one would know what I was doing, and I ran out of time. Perhaps in the future.