Ghoul-reetings, ladies and ghoul-tlemen! Perhaps you’ve thought, “I’d like to get in on that haunted house action this Halloween, but how?” Just follow these three simple steps.
Step 1:
To fashion a truly spook-tacular haunted house, one must first choose a house which is appropriate to the occasion. Sure, it’s cute when the guy around the corner decks out his single-level mid-seventies-era tract home with some styrofoam tombstones and cotton spiderwebs, but don’t you find yourself feeling a little bad for him just the same? Sure you do. The ideal house is two-story, Victorian style, with wood siding, chipped, peeling paint and walls bursting with water damage. You could say it’s a fixer-upper. You could also say, best haunted house, ever!
Not just any rotting old mansion will do. If your new home isn’t built on the site of what was once an ancient Native American burial ground, until it was turned into a gallows where once were hung the most bloodthirsty bandits the West ever saw, before a house was built and its first owners were brutally butchered by a murderer who has never been found to this day, leading it to be abandoned until years later it was converted into a mental institution where patients often died under mysterious circumstances connected to terrible secret experiments conducted by a doctor who was as mad as any of the patients, until he poisoned them all and committed suicide, leaving the house vacant ever since, visited only by curious young boys lured by the eerie, indescribable sounds emanating from within and the inexplicably dead small animals found in surprisingly large numbers within a twenty-yard radius of the house, well, then, keep looking!
Finally, if you’re not a strange old lady who feeds a lot of cats and is hated and feared by all the kids in the neighborhood, but who actually is really lonely and wants only to be loved, think seriously about becoming one. That totally freaks kids out.
Step 2:
Atmosphere! Perhaps you’ve heard tapes of creaks and screams, or seen little electronic devices that erupt in maniacal laughter upon detecting motion. These suck. Better to design a device with really scary noises, like the sound of the parents next door beating their child again, or that really distressing grinding and scraping noise coming from your computer’s hard drive when you know you didn’t even click on anything.
Throwing a Halloween party? Steal some fresh eyeballs from a morgue, then fool blindfolded party guests into thinking they’re dipping their hand into a bowl of peeled grapes. Also, invite some Wiccans over. While many believe Wicca is a benign, earth-centered religion emphasizing spirituality and respect for nature, the truth is that Wiccans are way freaky evil witches with pointy hats who will cast some pretty heinous spells that are guaranteed to make your party a memorable one. At the very least, they’ll get the Ouija board to say something cool.
Step 3:
Sit back and enjoy, secure in your success at scaring up a fright-tastically ghoul-d time.
