Make Your House Scary with a Halloween Graveyard

If you really want to go all out when decorating your house for Halloween, consider going one step further than a tombstone in the front yard. Go whole hog, create a Halloween graveyard at your house.

First, plot out your area of the yard for your little cemetary. If you can, section it off with a few stakes of short picket fence, painted black of course.

Tombstones - you want several. If you make your own, styrofoam will probably be a better bet. If you buy a 4' x 6' sheet you can get 4 to 8 tombstones out of it. Have fun writing creative, funny epitaphs.

Top off your tombstones with some extra. Drape cobwebs across tombstone. Fake cobwebs are cheap to buy and work so much better than cotton balls. Add Spanish moss around the base of the tombstone. You can buy fake moss, or you can emulate it with dark green pipe cleaners or streamers (which won't last a rainy day).

Bramble and leaves - complete your look of an overgrow and abandonned cemetary. Toss around leaves and branches and especially pile up some of your leaves and even some dirt around your tombstones.

Burial Mound - Add a heap or two in your Halloween graveyard. Throw sticks and maybe a few leaves around the heap for effect.

Fog - Place a fog machine behind one of your tombstones to throw a mist around your graveyard. Even low-end machines have timers so you can throw out just enough fog for 'atmosphere'.

Lighting - You want to under light your graveyard for a enough light to be visible and spooky but not too much. Place lights at the bottom of the tombstones so they shine up on them. One or two well placed flood lights work really well, especially blue colored. Or even try a lightning machine (they play thunder too!)

Bones and Body Parts - A Halloween graveyard is obviously a place where bones and even whole skeletons surface. Drape a bony arm over a tombstone. Hang a skeleton off a tree. Best, find a stump of hand to stick in the ground in front of a tombstone, crawling its way out.

Animals - Evil animals. Maybe perch a nice raven on your Halloween tombstone. Or maybe some large, creepy snakes. Or some huge nasty spiders.

Pumpkin - Add a Jack-O-Lantern or 2 for a final touch.

You may love decorating your yard for Halloween. Guess what? There are many, many kids and grown-ups who love your work! Keep it up. And if you want to go for the extra this year, create Halloween graveyard for ghoulish laughs.