How To Make Your House Look Haunted For Halloween

Today I’m taking a break from “serious” decor and having some over-the-top decorating fun with Halloween!

Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year! (As you probably already know if you have been around here before).

Every year I have a Halloween party where the entire inside of my house is transformed into something that is not recognizable as being my house! Some parts of it look so real that I have actually had people ask which are the parts that are only there for Halloween 🙂 (I do tend to go all out with the decorations.)

With Halloween getting more and more popular, I have had a few people asking me lately how I go about creating my Halloween haunted house. So I thought I would share some of my tried-and-true haunt your house tips. And although I usually do all of these things for my Halloween party, you can still have a great Halloween display by only picking a couple of them if you don’t want to do that much work.

In all cases, I find that staging things in a way that seems “real” has the most impact (like my skeleton bartender).

Sit skeletons at the table, place dead roses in a vase where you would normally have live ones, replace your family portrait pictures with Halloween portraits, or sit a plastic rat on the tub surround in the bathroom.  That way people don’t always see the props right away…and boy are they surprised when they finally notice they’re there!

One note: I don’t do blood and gore in my haunted houses (it’s just not something I’m into), so there won’t be any scary “massacre” pictures 🙂

Keep reading to find out more about how to make your house look haunted.

One of the ways to transform your home into a haunted house that will have the biggest impact is to use a scene setter to cover your walls.

To do this right, cover as much of the wall as possible with plastic or paper scenes that will make your house look completed different, especially under low light.

It is a bit of a time-consuming task to set up.  But it has a really big impact on the spooky factor!

This haunted mansion scene setter* is one of my favorite scene setters for creating a haunted house. The room really looks like it has run down paneling!

To learn how to install scene setters, click HERE.

Spider webs are a great way to add spookiness to your Halloween haunted house.  But making them look realistic is the key to success.

Try to set them up so that people have to walk through them.  In my opinion, there’s nothing scarier than thinking you have walked through a spider web and there might be a spider on you!

Stretchy spider web* works pretty well for pulling across the room or across a mirror.

To make them look realistic, less is more…tease the threads apart so you don’t end up with big clumps of spider web.

Creepy cloth* works better for draping over furniture, light fixtures and doors.

Get more ideas for using spider webs in your Halloween haunted house HERE.

Candles automatically add atmosphere to your haunted house.

I love the look of real candle light, but in a lot of cases, flame-less candles* are the way to go in a haunted house.

You can put them anywhere…even hang them from the ceiling to imitate Harry Potter.

You can also get the ones that have a timer and/or remote control so that you don’t have to go around turning them all on and off every night.

Find some more ways to use Halloween candles HERE.

Vase uplights* work well for adding some sparkle to your decanters. I add DIY Halloween bottle labels to make them look more Halloween like.

Or you can replace your light bulbs with special Halloween ones.

Replacing your chandelier bulbs with these flicker bulbs* will make your chandelier look like it has old-time flames.

Note: These bulbs don’t give off a lot of light so they are definitely for ambiance, not for providing light to see by.

For even more ideas for Halloween indoor lighting, click HERE.

Most of these props are motion or sound activated (or both), so they start working when people come near…definitely a little spooky!

Here are the urn and the spooky mirror when they haven’t been activated. They still fit right in with the decor!

Using a black light* can really up the spooky factor in your Halloween haunted house.

Anyone wearing white or fluorescent clothing will light up under it, and you can add all kinds of decorations that take advantage of the black light.

I painted this glow in the dark sign on my bathroom door. I thought it was rather appropriate 🙂

Metal Candle Trees* are a great way to add spookiness.  They kind of look like dead trees in the candle light.  (Who knew wedding decorations were great for Halloween?)

And it’s easy to add a crow* or two to the branches.

The trick to making critters effective is to place them around where people are not expecting them.

I like to put mice on the floor behind the bathroom door, have rats on the piano, and hang bats in a dark corner of the room…all places where people don’t notice they are there until they get close. The element of surprise gets them every time!

I like to hang Halloween pictures as if they are part of my normal decor…to figure out where to put them, I usually take down one of my regular pictures and put up a spooky Halloween one.

There are lots of options for spooky pictures that you can use for your Halloween decor.

1. Make your own Halloween silhouettes.  Just cut some Halloween shapes out of black construction paper and frame them.

2. Buy spooky portrait scene setters*.  This is an inexpensive way to get a lot of pictures and I have re-used them every year for a lot of years!

You’ll be surprised how real they look once they are hung up on the wall…especially in the low light usually found in haunted houses…

3. Another option is buy framed Halloween portraits* intended for this purpose.

I especially like the ones like these* that change expressions from normal to scary depending on which angle you are viewing them from.

Why buy plastic flowers when you can use real ones?

I like to buy a big bouquet of roses about 3 weeks before Halloween and then let them die in the vase instead of throwing them out.  (Plus you get the added bonus of enjoying a bouquet of beautiful flowers before hand!)

Then I place the vase somewhere that I would normally put live flowers.

Of course, if you can’t be bothered with live flowers…there are always black fake roses* (like the ones I used for my Phantom of the Opera party) which can be re-used over and over again.

Spanish moss* looks spooky regardless of how you use it.

Add it to chandeliers, furniture, planters, centerpieces or anywhere that could use some “brownery”.

Click HERE if you want to read the tutorial for making this chandelier.

Use a Halloween inspired black lace overlay* on top of a red tablecloth or orange table cloth.  It’s an easy way to add spookiness to your tables.

It’s pretty hard to make your house look haunted without hanging a ghost* or two.

Making a ghost is a really simple DIY project:  Glue or staple a piece of white fabric* (or a sheet) over a round styrofoam ball*. Then shred the ends to make it uneven, and hang it where people will see it.

Or you can use some of the lighting options that are available to project ghosts onto your wall*[wgCjTracking]. These work equally well inside or out.

Setting up some poseable skeletons* up so that they look like they are part of everyday life in the room makes them more interesting.

These ones are so much a part of the room that my cat decided to go to sleep in the skeleton’s lap.