How to Build the Best Haunted House in Your Neighbourhood

With Halloween fast approaching, many families like to plan out a spooky haunted house for the kids in the neighbourhood. Why settle for a lame bucket of candy outside of your house when you can construct a scary experience for trick-or-treaters they may never forget? Not only is creating a haunted house a way to make everyone's Halloween better--it's also a great opportunity for a creative DIY project!

Here are some tips for making the best haunted house in the neighbourhood, using the expertise of set designer Tadd Kroneck and Timothy Dahl, founder of a DIY site called Built By Kids.

Create a story

Many people think a haunted house is all about the decorations. However, you need an interesting and terrifying story to tell the neighbourhood children. Figure out whether you want your DIY project to feature a torture chamber, a witch's house or even a haunted burial ground. Once you've settled on a story, plan out the path visitors will take through your home.

Give your story a beginning and an end, so kids get the full experience of the narrative you wish to tell. Otherwise, people will just be wandering around aimlessly, which makes it a little less scary. Of course, only allow small groups of people in at a time, and be sure to keep groups at a decent distance from each other!

Create an atmosphere
Use props like fog machines and fans to construct the environment in which your haunted house will thrive. Set up speakers with looping Halloween music and place horrifying props and fake body parts (or whatever fits into your theme) in places where fog blocks visitors' vision. You can also have a family member wait around corners to scare people, or have someone create loud sounds to catch the neighbourhood children off guard.

Set the tone
You don't have to spend a fortune on lighting to create the right mood for your haunted house. Enhance the experience with flickering lights or colored light bulbs to fit the theme of your DIY project. Combined with the spooky music and fog, lighting can be a huge factor in scaring somebody's socks off!

Now for the decorations
If you've already set up large props around your haunted house to create the atmosphere and mood, you can now put the finishing touches on the experience with some smaller details. Cobwebs, jars of "eyeballs" and "fingers," fake skeletons in corners of the house--these can help bring your DIY project to the next level.