Spooktacular Ways to Decorate Your Home for Halloween

When it comes to celebrations in the U.S., Halloween is HUGE. According to the National Retail Foundation, Americans spent $8 billion on the haunted holiday in 2020, with 75% of that amount going toward decorations.

So why not join the party and make your space a little spookier this year? We’ve got some great, easy ideas to add some Halloween fun to your home…if you dare!

Someone Is Watching

Repurpose your summer beach balls by painting them white, then use a large bowl to trace circles for irises. Paint those black, and maybe add some red squiggly lines for a bloodshot effect. Affix them to trees and bushes around your yard to spy on your neighbors. To extend the theme indoors, place pairs of sticky googly eyes from a craft store to your house plants and bookshelves to keep a creepy eye on guests.

Spooky Spider Wreath

Arachnophobes may disagree, but try decorating your front door with a wriggly welcome made of a simple craft store grapevine wreath wrapped with faux cobwebs and plastic spiders. For a slightly friendlier take, a candy corn wreath is a sweet idea. Wrap a Styrofoam wreath with black duct tape and hot-glue candy corn around it in an orderly or quirky-jerky pattern. Just don’t eat your supplies!

Expert Tip

Dollar stores offer a “wealth” of Halloween help for decorating on a budget!

Tomato Cage Creeps

Don’t store those garden tomato cages just yet! They can make a host of glowing ghosts. Place the wide end of the cage on the ground, wrap with holiday string lights, then cover with a white sheet drawn with eyes and a mouth.

You can also make your friendly ghosts some friends of their own with tin can luminaries. With a Sharpie, use dots to draw Halloween patterns on tin cans you’ve saved and washed. Fill the cans with water and freeze (to give you a solid work surface). Use a hammer and nail to tap in your pattern with holes. Spray paint black or orange, drop in a votive candle, and set them along a walkway or affix a piece of coat hanger wire and hang them from shepherd’s hooks. Bonus: there’s no danger of fire as with paper luminaries.

Silly Skeletons

This time of year, you can find plastic skeletons at nearly any store selling Halloween décor. With a little two-sided tape, set them up around your yard and house, chatting on cell phones, dining at your table, or greeting guests on the front porch.

Haunted Mansion Mantel

Make your fireplace fun by adding frightful accents to your mantel. Look around your house or flea markets for old books, candlesticks, dolls, and other vintage accents. Replace family photos with framed silhouettes of Halloween favorites like the Grim Reaper, Frankenstein, and Count Dracula. Add stuffed owls, rubber bats, moss, and fake spiderwebs for an effect even Walt Disney would desire! You can continue the creeps in the corners of your house by creating witchy vignettes. Hang witches’ hats from the ceiling with monofilament and prop brooms in the corners, maybe with toy mice peeking out from beneath. Eek!

Freaky Front Stoops

It’s easy to give your guests a wicked welcome to your home with just a few supplies! No time to carve? No problem! Just spray paint some pumpkins black and wrap in gauze for instant mummies. Or create a litter of black cat pumpkins by fastening felt ears and whiskers. Surround them with some “mum-sters” by painting your plastic mum pots white then adding black eyes and mouth for a ghostly greeting.

Make your front door a blood-curdling bookshelf! Cut long, thin, rectangular pieces of colored craft paper and outline with classic titles like Dracula and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Fill in with gold paint and attach to the door with double-sided tape.

Goofy Graveyard

Abandon all hope, ye who enter your front yard! With some inexpensive Styrofoam sheets, spray paint, and a paring knife, you can make funny tombstones with epitaphs like “I.M. Wormfood,” “Ben Better,” and “Tomb Sweet Tomb” to garner ghoulish grins in passers-by. We hope these decorating ideas make your scary merry. Happy Halloween!