# Ghost theme party ideas



## printersdevil (Sep 7, 2009)

THe easiest to get going is a cemetery. You can either buy tombstones or make them. Walgreens, CVS and Dollar General have some pretty good gravebusters for not a lot of money.

Ghosts in trees, spiders, webs, etc. all add a lot of atmosphere without a lot of work. CHeck out some of the threads here for ideas.


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## JohnnyD97 (Aug 18, 2006)

I love ghost themes. You can suggest spookiness without really committing to showing people anything! If you don't have one already, build a Flying Crank Ghost. Doug Ferguson at Phantasmechanics created this staple Halloween effect and it looks amazing. There are lots of sites that will show you how to build one now too. 

Get the compact fluorescent blacklight bulbs. Not the regular incandescent bulbs that aren't even UV, just painted purple, but real blacklights. Replace your bulbs with them for eerie lighting. Just don't have any exposed where someone can look directly at the UV bulb b/c it is ultraviolet radiation and can damage eyes. 

Replace some of your bulbs with flicker bulbs. You can buy them at most hardware stores now, just get them early before the Halloween rush. You can also buy them cheaper online. Between them and your blacklights, your two light sources won't compete with each other too much and give your house a nice spooky atmosphere.

Another thing I have used to great effect is cheese cloth. I'll buy yards of it and hang it from entry ways and ceilings. Rip holes in it, tear it, distress it. Cut it to different lengths and shapes. Ribbon it. I'll also run it in stairwells, hanging down every few steps so people have to walk through it. With the blacklights, it will have a neat color, but you can also treat it with some glow in the dark additives to make it really look ghostly.

If you have a cemetery set up as printersdevil suggested, look into a fog machine and chiller for more of that classical haunted house atmosphere.

Don't forget some good sound effects. A lot of people play music for haunted houses. I like playing atmospheric sounds, like wind, crunching leaves, shovels digging. You can browse the music forum for more suggestions for either music (Nox Arcana, Midnight Syndicate) or atmospheric (Martha Stewart has a great CD - I'm not even kidding).

Can't help you with Zombies. They freak me out.

Good luck!


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## mysterymaiden (Aug 11, 2008)

I'm all about the reflections in ghost themes. Last year I tried this and it was awesome. Get an ok mirror and take a razor and lightly scrape off the back. Print off scary faces or antique photographs and tape them to the back of the mirror. When people look in the 'mirror' they see a ghost- totally cool. You can also do this on table tops by laying the faces under the mirror placed on top of the table. I picked up a number of crappy mirrors from garage sales and they were perfect - even scored a few awesome frames for next to nothing.

As for the pond, could you use the same idea for under the water? I'm thinking a sort of corpses in the depths thing, like Frodo saw in Lord Of The Rings?

Can't wait to hear how it all turns out!


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## Freakmeout (Aug 23, 2010)

Thanks for the ideas! I looked up the flying crank ghost & found some great how to sites - looks like a great addition to all my other stuff.


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