How to Make a Backyard Haunted Forest for Halloween

Usually your backyard is a place to enjoy family activities. When Halloween rolls around that same backyard can be filled with horror. Turning your backyard into a haunted forest is a fun Halloween activity. Create terrifying trails of zombies, witches and vampires. Use your haunted forest as a location for a party, scavenger hunt or just have children and adults walk through. Turning a backyard into a haunted forest takes creativity and planning.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Decide what age group will be visiting. You will want decorations and themes to be less scary for younger children. Older kids may appreciate spooky, gory scenes.
2. Bring in extra plants. Buy or borrow fake trees from family and friends. To create the look of a forest the yard should be as dense with plants and trees as possible. Place fake spider webs all over the trees.
3. Draw a blueprint of your yard. Divide the yard into sections. Create a scary theme for each section. Some ideas are skeleton ally, vampire's row and mummy's tomb.
4. Buy decorations for each of your themes sections. Party supply stores, Halloween costume shops and online specialty stores are good places to start looking. Buy masks to create scary characters. Other props to purchase are severed hands, fake blood, skeletons, plastic bats and rats.
5. Create zombies. Fill old clothes with straw. Make a ball of straw for the head. Buy a zombie mask to place over the straw head. Place fake blood all over the zombies. Make some zombies with their head separated from their body. Place the zombies in various locations throughout the yard.
6. Make a cemetery. No haunted forest is complete without a cemetery. Buy fake tombstones at a party supply store or Halloween specialty store. Place potting soils around to make it look like freshly dug graves. Add a few bloody hands to look like they are coming up from the grave.
7. Use accent lighting. To allow visitors to see all the scary themes in the dark put up lights directed at your displays. Use strobe lights, flood lights or black lighting.

Tips & Warnings

• Use sound effects. Purchase a type of scary music or one with sound effects. Play it as guests walk through.
• Rent a fog machine to add to the creepy atmosphere.
• Recruit a few friends to dress in costumes such as witches and vampires to jump out and scare visitors as they walk through your haunted forest.
• Put a sign up warning parents if it may be frightening for children under a certain age.