Halloween Yard Decorations

With the right Halloween yard decorations, you can create a perfect spooky environment for your Halloween celebrations. Halloween is one of the most popular holidays of the years, especially in the US, and many people really go all out with their celebrations. For many, this means really going to town with decorating both the insides and outsides of their homes, and fortunately there's a very wide range of outdoor Halloween decorations to choose from. This article gives some more information about the different types of outdoor decor that you can use if you're looking for Halloween decorating ideas.

Types Of Halloween Yard Decorations

Halloween decorating ideas for the yard fall into three main groups – props, lighting and sound. Let's take a look at these in turn.

These are physical items that you can place around your yard, and involve objects with Halloween motifs, such as:

Tombstones – make your garden look like a mini-graveyard with some tombstones. These are generally made of lightweight material, so they're easy to carry around and set up, but the good quality ones look like real stones nonetheless. Make sure you leave enough space between them to give the illusion of real graves. Or you can get smaller, more jokey tombstones also. Some Halloween tombstones are sprayed with UV paint that will glow under black light – great for that extra touch of ghoulishness!

Pumpkins – you can use real pumpkins that have been carved or decorated – a few glowing pumpkin lanterns will look great in any garden (see pumpkin decoration ideas). Or if all that carving isn't for you, you can buy plastic pumpkin props that look almost as good as the real thing. Like many Halloween props, some pumpkins are mounted on stakes to secure them in place.

House decorations – you can also buy props to add to the exterior of your house, such as skulls, Halloween wreaths etc to mount to your door, banners to string along the roof, or Halloween-themed lampshades to place over exterior lights.

Statues – you might like to pick up a few figures to place in your yard – try statues of the Grim Reaper, witches, devils, skeletons, zombies etc. You can also get versions to hang from the trees, or that appear to be digging their way up from within the ground.

Fog – if you really want to go all out with your Halloween yard decorations, hire (or buy) a fog machine – perfect for creating those ghostly tendrils around your tombstones!

Spiderwebs – always a great favourite at Halloween, you can buy artificial spiders webs to hang in your trees and elsewhere in the yard. Either buy them whole, or get a special spiderweb gun (such as that by Webcaster), and make your own!

Special Halloween lighting can really enhance the ambiance of your yard. You can buy strings of small Halloween lights (usually orange or purple in colour), get individual lanterns shaped like pumpkins or other Halloween motifs, use black lights to make fluorescent props glow, or try out strobe lights or lightning-effect lights, among other ideas. Just be sure to only use lights that are approved for outdoor use – indoor Halloween lights aren't safe to be used outdoors (read more about outdoor Halloween lights).

Just as a horror movie gets much of its impact from the music that creates the scary atmosphere, so will your Halloween décor. All of your visual decorations will be greatly enhanced by a spooky soundtrack, and there are many special Halloween recordings that you can buy, featuring ghostly moans and screams, as well as unsettling music – check out Midnight Syndicate for especially good CDs of this type.