The Ultimate Halloween Party Guide

By Penny Warner

Put the “Boo!” in your Halloween bash and create your own hip and happening Haunted House.

Invitations
Ransom Note: Glue colorful foam letters on a sheet of gray foam cut like a tombstone to make a personalized ransom note. Place in a large envelope, along with creepy tattoos, fake scars, plastic body parts, glow in the dark snakes or other scary stuff and mail to unsuspecting guests.

Trick or Treat Bags: Write party details on trick or treat bags using glow-in-the-dark markers. Place inside a large envelope, along with Halloween candies or costume accessories. Write “Open in the dark!” on the outside of the envelope, decorate with stickers and mail to guests.

Costumes
Give your guests an “Ex-Scream Makeover” with these easy add-ons.

Creepy: Have plenty of “blood” on hand to enhance those pristine costumes. Hand out Dracula, Frankenstein, werewolf or mummy masks. Give guests goofy glasses, wax fangs, eyeball rings and wound tattoos. Offer long fingernails, garish makeup and colorful capes, too. 

Cute: Give the kids candy or toy bracelets and necklaces, candy or gummy teeth and fangs. Pass out foam witch, ghost or animal masks. Top off with bat hats or pumpkin “heads.”

Decorations
Design your own hip and happening Haunted House.

Welcome the guests with scary signs that read, “Haunted House This Way” and “Greetings from the Grave.” Set up personalized tombstones and fill the front yard with giant inflatable pumpkins, monsters, mummies and scarecrows. Stretch cobwebs over the door, complete with rubber spiders.

Create theme stations in each room, such as “Witches Cottage,” “Ghosts in the Graveyard,” “Mad Scientist’s Lab,” and “Pumpkin Patch”.  Make one room a “Glow-in-the-Dark Dungeon” filled with glow teeth, glow eyes, glow footprints, glow wands, etc. Cover the walls and windows with Haunted House wall hangings, and turn the party room into a Creepy Chamber, a Boo-tiful Bookcase or Ghoulish Graveyard.

Spook it up with a fog machine for atmosphere. Replace regular light bulbs with green light bulbs or black lights. Light candles shaped like fingers, skulls and eyeballs. Play scary music in the background.

Add creepy critters. Sprinkle plastic spiders, rats, and snakes around the room, along with bloody plastic hands and feet, skeletons and skulls. Hang bats, crows and vultures from the ceiling. Add black balloons decorated with skulls.

Trick up the table. Cover the table with a “bloody” tablecloth. Serve the treats in black witch’s caldrons, tombstone cups, witch’s boot mugs and skeleton hand glasses. Use Halloween straws and sippy cups for the kids.

Games
Trick or Treat Treasure Hunt. Hide creepy items, like plastic eyeballs, gummy teeth, etc. Give the kids decorated bags or plastic pumpkins to collect them.

Baffling Body Parts. Fill individual bags with creepy stuff, such as sticky spiders, brains, eyeballs and other slimy things. Have the kids feel inside the bag and guess what “it” is.

Skeleton Hands. Give the kids skeleton hand grabbers and have them try to retrieve Halloween treats from a black caldron.

Eyeball Bounce. Have pairs stand two feet apart and bounce “eyeballs” back and forth, each time taking a step backwards. Play again with inflatable Halloween balls, but throw and catch instead of bounce.

Activities
Funny/Fearsome Face. Let the guests make their own masks, using foam for the face and candy or plastic eyes, noses and mouths.

Cool Caramel Apples. Provide apples-on-a-stick for the guests to swirl melted caramel. Have candies and sprinkles to use for decoration.

Bat the Bat. Hang up a bat piñata filled with Halloween candy and let the guests swing away.

Sticky Slimy Stuff. Let the kids play with sticky spiders, insect putty, bloody slime, alien slime and other creepy concoctions.

Pumpkin People. Break into teams, give each team a pumpkin and have them decorate it with craft items and creepy body parts.

Food
Monster Mash. Serve Monster Finger pretzels, chocolate and gummy body parts, eyeball lollipops or gumballs, bone and skeleton pops, spooky cookies and gummy fingers (Flesh Fries!).

Bonecakes. Make your own skeleton cupcakes using molds. Let the kids decorate them with gummy face parts.

Witches Brew. Serve cranberry cocktail with gummy worms frozen in ice cubes. Or freeze lime punch in a plastic glove, remove the glove and float the “hand” in the punch. Set over dry ice and serve in glow-in-the-dark cups.

Favors
Ghoulish Goodies. Give the guests Halloween goody bags filled with bendable skeletons and plastic spiders, scary suckers and gummy body parts, and seasonal stamps and stickers, etc.

Pumped up Pumpkins. Make it a pumpkin theme and pass out pumpkin playing cards, inflatable pumpkins, pumpkin hats or miniature pumpkins.

Ghostly Glow. Give them glow-in-the-dark toys, such as light sticks, flashlights, necklaces and cups.