by Paola Fanutti

Created on: October 12, 2009

Haunted houses and the spirits of the damned themselves, conjure (no pun intended) imagination and fascination on All Hallow's Eve, Samhain, the unholiest of nights, when the astral veil separating the living and the dead is at its thinnest. Get into the terrifying and festive mood and add to the number of haunted attractions and walks "creep(y)ing" up in your city by making your house the spookiest on the block. Or better yet, throw your next Halloween bash at a historical venue with an attested supernatural past.

To fix up your place in time for Halloween and make it into a haunted house, start with your lawn. Nothing attracts fear and dangerous curiosity like a meticulously spooky lawn and front door. Carve out the ripest and biggest Jack-O-Lanterns into the most contorted and grotesque faces you can muster and set up about 10 to 20 of them in a vertical line, facing each other on either sides of your driveway, staring painfully and agonizingly as costumed children walk past them to reach your door. Or simply place them wherever you think trick or treaters will fear them most.

Set up fake and eerily evil props all over your lawn. Costume and prop shops, and even "Dollar Stores" sell tons of decorative Halloween props, perfect for outdoor and indoor decor. Fake tombstones, bats, skulls and skeletons, coffins and cobwebs and rubber spiders, along with fake blood and gore spookify and enhance the evil atmosphere and work outdoors and indoors.

When putting together and running a haunted house, two particular aspects to pay attention to are lighting and sound. Lighting should be soft, minimal, teasing, and preferably orange. Your candles in your hideously carved Jack-O-Lanterns should be enough to illuminate your lawn, and produce a scary effect, and as your doomed and damned visitors draw near, they should be beckoned by an equally soft candle lighting indoors. Beside your door or entrance should be a Jack the Ripper guardian or mummy, bearing the blood stained sign "Enter if You Dare."

To create a scary effect, close your curtains, save for a small opening that lets out the soft, muddled and mottled illuminating glow of multi-coloured candle light. Opening the door should "treat" trick or treaters to a dark but distant candlelight scene. Let them stumble towards the light for a moment or two in the darkness, searching their way through hanging bats and skeletons and stepping on rubber spiders and slipping on fake blood, before finding you seated at the candle

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