How to DIY your way to an extra-spooky house this Halloween

You don’t need a big Hollywood budget to create one of the scariest yards, porches or walkways this Halloween. With a little creativity and planning, you can create a memorable visitor experience that your friends and neighbors will be talking about for years to come.

1. Garage Door Monster

More than 25 million online visitors have checked out Amanda Destro Pierson’s monstrously fun garage door (which is in her Facebook post below). When the door opens, it appears that a giant creature is getting ready to take a bite of something—or someone. Place some white netting or other material that looks like cobwebs inside the garage directly behind the door, or hang a large sheet with a painted tongue and tonsils for more fun.

2. Lawn Mower Accident

You’ll want to leave your mower out on the lawn for this one. Use some old clothing and create a severed body, putting half of your “corpse” on each side of a lawnmower. Add some “blood and guts” for a more gruesome effect. If you’ve got a riding mower, seat a store-bought skeleton on it for more ghoulish fun (which is what Deb Clouser did in this Pinterest post). If you don’t have a lawnmower, make believe your garage door closed on someone, cutting them in half!

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3. Halloween Obstacle Course

Make trick-or-treaters take a serpentine path to your front door, walking through a “graveyard” complete with tombstones, mangled bodies and giant spiders, or running a candy corn relay race like the one The Inspired Treehouse shared. Make sure your path is well-defined to avoid trips or falls.

4. Severed Head Greeter

Cut a hole in a large towel or other material and place it over a table into which you’ve cut a hole. The hole should be big enough for someone to get underneath the table and stick his head through, as this Facebook post from Atkins Farms County Market shows. The material should cover the table and go all the way to the ground, hiding the “body” of your otherwise headless person. Have the person who has his severed head on the table made up with scary makeup and remain completely still as visitors approach the door. As visitors comment how lifelike the head is, have your zombie yell, “Trick or treat!” and scare the daylights out them.

You can find step-by-step directions for making a severed-head table here.

5. Portable Graveyard

Fill a wheelbarrow with dirt and add a tombstone with a funny inscription, or some protruding body parts — or a whole skeleton, like Rhonda Krieger did in this pin:

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6. Silhouette Windows

Make large cutout cats, spiders, ghosts, skeletons, witches and pumpkins and place them in the windows of your home. Open the curtains and turn on the lights, into which you’ve place red, orange and yellow light bulbs. You can also place colored filters over regular bulbs.

7. Trick Or Tree

Provide some “ent”-ertainment by channeling a favorite Lord of the Rings character. Turn your trees into ents with eyes, noses and mouths, and moss beards and goatees. You can also create a man-eating shrub like this clever homeowner, posted by Budget101:

8. Ladder Fall

If you’ve got a ladder, you’ve got the main ingredient for a gag that will have cars slowing down and visitors rushing to help. Create a full-size dummy of a person using old clothes. Place the hands of your dummy person on your gutter, with the rest of the body hanging down as if the ladder he was just standing on fell. Place your ladder sideways on the ground, underneath your dangling dummy. The pic below, posted on Facebook by Ryan Wood, is Christmas-themed (the dummy was allegedly hanging Christmas lights), but your man could possibly be hanging Halloween lights or cleaning leaves out of the gutter.

Can you top these?