# Graveyard lighting



## Tlw109 (Aug 27, 2017)

So, we are planning on ramping up our graveyard this year with some home made tombstones. What is the best way to provide lighting to the tombstones? I’d hate to run wires all throughout the yard so is there a recommended led that works better? Thanks!


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## Madame Leota (Sep 19, 2005)

When we had a large tree in our yard I would run a cord up into the tree and hang a couple of green floodlights where they would cast an eerie green glow over the whole graveyard. It was magical! But then the tree started dying and had to be removed so now I have a bare yard and no choice but to run cords on the ground for my lighting. It's not so bad really, just push the cords as far down into the grass as possible and secure them with landscape pins. If you are fortunate enough to have dead leaves laying around, pile some over any cords that might show.


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## 65Ace (Jan 29, 2015)

One approach to lighting tombstones that I've had good results with is taking an old soup can, painting it black and then either attaching it to a small wooden stake (also painted black) hidden behind the back of another tombstone or other prop OR dig a small hole in front of the tombstone you want to light and put the soup can in the hole. Then place a small LED flashlight like the kind you can get at Harbor Freight (usually FREE if you buy something else and have a coupon; or $3 for two) inside the soup can and adjust the direction as necessary to get the desired lighting effect. Cheap and effective solution to graveyard lighting with no wires and one of those mini flashlights will last for several nights before you need to replace the batteries.


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## acanton04 (Sep 4, 2016)

I think it depends on what you are going for. For spotlighting tombstones, I found some solar lights with yard stakes on clearance at the end of july/beginning of august at target and big lots- one buck a piece. I also have witch lanterns made of mason jars, I just throw a flameless battery operated candle in there. It really depends on how big your yard/haunt is; what kind of ambient lighting you have (do you have bright streetlighs?- my neighborhood doesn't have any which can be great if you have bright/efficient lighting of your own), and how much you're willing to spend/store. The generic ones I got from target have held up over 2 years and they provide the exact amount of light I need- it also works because I get a lot of sun. If you don't, the LED flashlight spotlight (there's plenty of tuts- just use the search box) is definitely an inexpensive and effective way to go.


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## Tlw109 (Aug 27, 2017)

Thanks everyone. The last few years, we’ve put up a “cemetery fence” and contained the tombstones inside that fence with the fence being lit. This year, my wife wants to just fill our entire front yard with tombstones and not use the fence. It’s a fairly big yard quite a bit to light up. Not a lot of ambient light. We live on a cul de sac without a street light. The thought is to just spotlight each tombstone somehow. Solar lights would be nice so I don’t have to turn them on and off every night.


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## scarybella (Aug 4, 2010)

I am no lighting guru, and to be honest last year was the first year I spent any time on lighting which in reality is pretty crazy. we can spend for ever and a day making props only for them to go overlooked because people cant see them.

I used loads of different lights throughout our cemetery but the ones for each stone were simple led strips fastened onto some plastic garden spikes. it's not perfect but I was quite happy with how things looked. apologies for the poor night time photos. one year I'll get the hang of low light photography lol

The small led strips are really cheap on ebay etc


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## lilibat (Aug 10, 2015)

I'm a fan of lighting from trees. I put my stuff out mid september and doing battery stuff that has to be turned on my hand everyday is not going to work. 

I put a blue LED flood in the tree in front, a Black light LED in the tree in the GY, and a red one off to the side on a camouflaged pole. A small green one behind a stone up the tree.

The Candles have timers.


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## HauntedWyo (Apr 13, 2017)

If you don't have trees in your yard to place lights, you could put a couple of LED spotlights at the front corners and maybe the front middle of your yard and aim them towards the graveyard. Or you could do mini spot lights for each stone using pre-wired LED bulbs, and some PVC pipe. The wires needed to wire them are small so they would be easier to hide and hold down in the yard. There is a tutorial on this forum somewhere on how to make mini spot lights. You should be able to wire quite a few lights to one 12 Volt 1-2 amp power supply.


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## Gweede (Jun 20, 2015)

Scarybella, your lighting turned out very well! Thanks for the idea!


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## Mapleton Manor (Aug 2, 2014)

You can go here:

https://www.halloweenforum.com/tutorials-and-step-by-step/165489-adjustable-spotlight-using-c7-bulbs.html

I have made many of these for our cemetery and they work great for the tombstones. You can also use LED bulbs but this will give you a good idea how to make them.


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## LisaiTX (Jul 6, 2016)

Although not LED, we buy those cheap $1 flashlights at the dollar store and prop them up in front of some of the tomb stones. Some come with the battery, too! I've also tried, but not yet been successful, in tinting the glass to get a better effect.


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## Whispers in the Park (Jun 6, 2009)

I've tried it all over the years. Started with incandescent flood lights, made my own LED spotlights, bought LED bulbs and used outdoor spotlight stakes with plastic paint buckets around them painted black (still use these and they work great), and have bought professional style LED spots. Personally, the time and effort spent making LEDs isn't worth it to me anymore as you can buy them cheaply nowadays. 10 years ago it was a different story. I suggest shielding the light with a bucket, can, etc. Home Depot, FrightProps, Gantom, among others have lots of options. Good luck.


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## ondeko (Oct 14, 2008)

Tlw109 said:


> So, we are planning on ramping up our graveyard this year with some home made tombstones. What is the best way to provide lighting to the tombstones? I’d hate to run wires all throughout the yard so is there a recommended led that works better? Thanks!


I use a combination of flood lights, solar spot lights and led candles. I have at least 2 flood lights [one blue and one green] set at the front corners of my graveyard pointed at the opposite back corners so the shadows are thrown diagonally. My best/favorite tombstones are light with solar spot lights hidden behind another prop or buried in dry leaves. the whole graveyard is scattered with more than 50 LED candles of different types. these get set in front of the tombstones, in niches built for them on the crypt facades, and on top of the sarcophagus so it looks like the classic cliche of a voodoo graveyard


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## trachcanman (Dec 17, 2015)

I bought a bunch of waterproof 10 watt LED spot lights off eBay that were 12 vdc. ordered a hand full of AA battery cases off amazon that held 8 AA batteries to give me the required voltage and since LED lights draw milliamps I could run several spot lights off one battery case. I did notice last year the price had gone up on the lights plus they ship from china and take a month or more to show up. they were the kind that came with a small remote to allow you to select color light coming out of the spot light. I suggest you power them up set the light color you want and hope they stay that way the next time you power them up because they response to the remote maybe once or twice before it stops working. with one or two lights on a battery case I could run them for several days for a few hours and left all of them on over Halloween night and they were still running the next morning. When searching on ebay I found the lights for about fifty bucks from I guess a reseller, but kept searching and found the same lights for six or seven dollars each by buying directly from the source so you have to do a lot of looking to get the best price.


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## Hallow Queen (Aug 2, 2011)

I've always used small strobe lights. A lot of our Halloweens are rainy or snowy (ugh) so I don't like using anything with a cord.


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## Brandon Reuter (Oct 8, 2015)

I use one of those cheap 5$ laser light shows from the xmas section at walmart. puts off a nice array but isn't super bright and reflects nicely off the fog.


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## Big_Al (May 29, 2012)

Tlw109 said:


> So, we are planning on ramping up our graveyard this year with some home made tombstones. What is the best way to provide lighting to the tombstones? I’d hate to run wires all throughout the yard so is there a recommended led that works better? Thanks!


The problem you face is running leds off of batteries. This ok but not a good option. The leds are fine but they need to be powered by normal house voltage 110volts ac. If you use standard Brown extension cords they will not be noticed in the evening. Good luck.


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## 66539 (Feb 20, 2016)

Tlw109 said:


> I’d hate to run wires all throughout the yard so is there a recommended led that works better? Thanks!


If you really want to avoid cords, and you don’t want to wire up a whole bunch of battery packs for the lights yourself, a possible choice is the one that we’ve used for four years in our little graveyard. We bought battery powered LED spotlights from the Dollar Tree. They’re usually in the tool section next to the light bulbs. But we have a bunch of them that are in the shapes of teddy bears and flowers because we found them over in the baby section when we needed more but couldn’t find the round ones. 

We run them every year with batteries we get for free with coupons at Harbor Freight. (We buy lots of stuff from them, so by the time Halloween rolls around we have about ten packages of the batteries.) They take three AAA batteries, and they usually last the season on one set of batteries. But we only put out our display on the weekends and Halloween night.









We take the pucks apart and spray paint their shell black and then hide them in the shadows. Some, as shown in the picture, we hide in the bushes. That way, the light they cast comes complete with strange shadows. Some that are used as down-lighting we paint to match the house color. They have double sided tape patches on the back, so putting them on the porch roof was pretty easy. To make them light up different colors, we took a sharpie to the clear plastic cover and added a few coats front and back. It works great. We had blue, green, and yellow lights that all looked quite professional despite what they were.

We make some of our tombstones with their backs open to hide the lights. Those tombstones are up in front lighting the ones behind them. That way, we can pretty much spot any of the rows of tombstones or any special prop using either the bushes or tombstones to hide all the little pucks.









The effect is pretty good for the most part, but they do have to be turned on and off every night, and you have to have a decent memory for where you hide them all. For us it worked great when that’s what we could afford. But this year we’re committing a larger portion of our tiny budget to lighting. That means we’re going to have wires all over our graveyard. We have autumn leaves to hide cords. For us it’s just easier to flip one switch and have Halloween turn on than it is to walk around adjusting it every night. 

That said, the road to accepting wires as a necessary evil for our graveyard was one that took us five years to travel. People loved our graveyard with our little Dollar Tree lights, and every night I put them out, I got just the feeling I wanted to get -- that we had created something magical that would creep the kids out. Work with whatever makes you feel comfortable, but if you’re like most haunters, that constant tweaking to make things better will always be a part of who you are. Sometimes that even means you figure out a way to make peace with wiring all over your front yard.


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## 66539 (Feb 20, 2016)

ondeko said:


> I use a combination of flood lights, solar spot lights and led candles. I have at least 2 flood lights [one blue and one green] set at the front corners of my graveyard pointed at the opposite back corners so the shadows are thrown diagonally. My best/favorite tombstones are light with solar spot lights hidden behind another prop or buried in dry leaves. the whole graveyard is scattered with more than 50 LED candles of different types. these get set in front of the tombstones, in niches built for them on the crypt facades, and on top of the sarcophagus so it looks like the classic cliche of a voodoo graveyard


Your graveyard sounds amazing. Do you have any pictures of it that we can see? The way you're using LED candles in the crypt facades is particularly interesting to me. We're building mausoleums this year, and a few ideas on lighting them seem in order. So, if there's a way to post a few, or a place where we can go to see them, I'd be grateful.


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## matrixmom (Oct 29, 2010)

lilibat: Secure them zip ties in the trees? how are they protected from rain?


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## Tlw109 (Aug 27, 2017)

Thanks for the posts everyone. Lots of good ideas on here. We’ve been slowly ramping up our haunt the past few years and this year we plan on stepping it up a few notches. Time to start working on some of these ideas.


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## debbiedowner67 (Sep 13, 2015)

Costco sells a pack of 5 puck lights that are remote controlled for about $10- $15. You can change the lights to green and red. I could not find them on their site. These are the ones they sell but the link is from Amazon 

https://www.amazon.com/Capstone-Puc...F8&qid=1534160054&sr=1-9&keywords=puck+lights


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