More Props
Garage sale coffin and on-line ordered skeleton. Black cat is for comic relief. By Halloween night there was a small soul hanging from the skeletons mouth. Not sure why, but it wasn't my place to question the "final touch" experts.
Another cheap skull picked up on-line. We scattered them all over the yard. They never really had a home. They roamed.
Here's what you do with empty lantern cages. Find a severed head, dress it up a bit and jam it inside the lantern. I kept this back out of the way so small TOTs didn't see it and not want to come in the yard. For those wanting a great lantern like device, hit your local Goodwill or similar thrift store and buy up the used bug zappers. Rip the guts out and you've got a great working base for all kinds of mayhem with a hanger already installed on top.
Another old tombstone I've been using for years. Roaming skull wasn't in that spot the next day.
My baby this year. She was featured in the newspaper with me trying to keep her from blowing away. We used a full sized garbage can for her cauldron, dressed it up with spray foam and installed an old stereo system with a turntable on it. The turning table gave us the stirring action and we split the output from the fogger into her kettle as well as across the porch. Worked great during the open house on Saturday. Sunday I built my first fog chiller in under 10 minutes as the wind changed and threw a monkey wrench in the whole shebang just as we were preparing to let folks in the gates. Remember, always keep a hot glue gun plugged in all day on Halloween. This came in handy more than once during the day/night. Dennis added a black light bulb inside her "cauldron", pointed a strobe light at her and along with the soundtrack blaring out from behind her she wowed the crowd.
More stuff we through out at the last minute.
We built the talking coffin on Halloween afternoon. The coffin itself was one that Dennis assembled for our house last year in the old neighborhood. His first ever coffin. It needed only minor repairs this year.We ripped apart one of those talking boxes that says "excuse me, excuse me, would you let me out of here!!" and screwed its guts to the inside of the coffin. Put a small sign on the outside that said "knock here" and of course even people that weren't coming to the yard stopped and knocked as they were going by on the sidewalk. This couple above had a good time watching their dog try to figure the whole thing out.
Not everyone noticed this. I stripped my trampoline down to its frame last year and laid out the clothesline over it until I was happy with it. Broke out the hot glue gun from there and went to town. This is year two and it's seems to be holding up pretty well. Next year I dip it in whitener and put a black light on the roof with it. Should get more attention that way. It didn't help that the witch was on the porch stealing the show right below it I suppose.
Here's the view from a bit farther back.
Next page is night shots:
Or follow the link below to close ups of the walls of pain and the bloody fountain: