2026 Haunt Lighting

Put together this year's haunt light stringers which will go up on the house towards the end of September. Purple, green, and lime facetted LED C9 bulbs will create a nice ambient color palette for the haunt but will also help advertise our haunt from afar on Halloween night since not everyone on our street gets into the spirit of things. We wish our neighborhood was more like the one in Clinton Township, Michigan.

2026 Prop Builds & New Additions

Our new 2026 aedicula style headstone prop built and ready to be painted. This one is going in the front yard cemetery space on Halloween. After it's painted and antiqued, the copper patina finished corbels for the side columns and the Victorian style appliques for the base's front and sides will be added permanently. We have a wide array of copper patina plaques for the top pediment and main body for this Halloween and future ones to choose from. Also to go with our 2026 "Frankenstein's Bride" theme we purchased some warm amber Edison LED bulbs to go in our garage carriage lights and found similar (although unfortunately not as warm looking in hue) rechargeable outdoor rated Edison LED bulb lanterns that have removable hanging arms. A pair will hang from the front porch and a pair will sit on our column props flanking each side of our front door. Because we did a laboratory themed vignette with Frankenstein's monster on our front porch for our 2022 Classic Horror Movie Monsters theme we are going for a different look this year.

Candelabra Mods

We purchased a pair of these 47" tall standing candelabras from Amazon last year. While they were a good deal price wise at the time, they are rather light weight and top heavy with faux LED candles. We had a pair of 2.5 pound enamel coated iron disc weights from an old weight bar set that we were able to install on the candelabra bases. The candelabra bases and stand poles are hollow and screw together. We were able to fit threaded rods through the existing holes in the bases. With a nylon locking nut on each end of the threaded rods along with 2" washers on the bottoms, the disc weights are held firmly in place. Much less likely for the candelabras to tip over from a strong gust of wind and you can't tell the disc weights were added to them.

Halloween Lighting

One of the biggest investments/outlays we make regarding our yard haunts is in lighting. We try to be creative and change up the various light elements in our haunts every year so that each themed haunt looks different from a prior haunt, even if we're revisiting a theme we've done in the past. This year we're using Spirit Halloween Red "Fire & Ice" spot lights, facetted LED C9 bulbs on our house (creates a nice ambient lighting effect for the haunt), and other various LED accent lights throughout the haunt. And we're always on the lookout for something interesting and came across Tru-Tone vintage looking LED Christmas and Halloween light bulbs. Really love the vintage Halloween style advertising/marketing.

Local Area Haunts 2025 Part 2

After our very enjoyable Halloween themed dinner at New York Beer Project last night in Victor, NY, we spotted some more local area haunts on our drive home.

Cemetery Fence Columns Completed

The faux flame light sconces and D-ring fence chain connectors have been installed on the cemetery columns.

Local Area Haunts 2025 Part 1

Our first sighting while out for a drive tonight. Halloween season has begun!

Ghostly Lighting

We already had to repair the 10+ year old hanging skeleton bride and groom prop we forgot all about and never used before. After barely a week it was found lying on the ground. The hanging strings mounted inside the skulls snapped after exposure to a few days of rain and wind. The glued on groom's "top hat" also became detached. A classic example as to one of the reasons we don't set up the "real" Halloween haunt until just before Halloween in these parts. We installed some eye screws and attached some new hanging strings. We also ditched the "witchy" looking top hat. One of the things that we are very happy about is how the custom color palette of LED C9 bulbs on the house created a nice multitone lighting of the prop down below. While the C9 bulbs don't fit the more authentic/realistic "haunted house/yard haunt" aesthetic, it does create softer and more realistic ambient lighting of the props below. We are able to use less flood and spot lights on the ground actually creating a spookier atmosphere at eye/ground level. The C9 bulbs on the house also serve as a beacon on Halloween night to let trick-or-treaters know there's something of interest to be seen down the street. We have several party pooper houses on our street that turn off their lights on Halloween night, so we upped the ante and doubled down so to speak.

Pre-Haunt Outdoor Decor 2024

A couple other homes on our street put up their outdoor Halloween decorations and lights earlier this week, which was our cue that it was time to put the pre-haunt decor up with a teaser of what this year's haunt theme is. We're very pleased with the color palette of the bulbs we used in our light stringers. The below photos were taken at dusk, but once it was completely dark out, the bulbs imparted a faint ambient color wash on the house and the grounds below without being overly bright.

Outdoor LED Black Lights

We have a variety of outdoor rated LED black lights (12W spot, 27W array, and 50W flood) and had to determine which ones to use and where for lighting our "Ghostly Blue Glowing Skeletons" in this year's haunt. The 12W spot lights take up very little real estate but are also magnitudes weaker in the amount of glow they produce with the UV-Effect spray painted skeletons. Our 27W low profile array style lights (used for the test photos posted previously on this blog) required 18 inch long boards for mounting bases and took up too much jack-o-lantern real estate along our front walkway. Two of our 50W floods packed more punch than three of the 27W arrays and only required 9 inch long boards for mounting. We'll use three of the 27W arrays for the skeletons that will go around our maple tree in the front yard. The 50W bases will be painted matte gray or brown and the 27W bases will be painted matte forest green to blend in with the lawn.

Yard Haunt Phase 1 Lighting Tests

Did a few quick lighting tests last night while the weather was still pleasant (it's wet, windy, and much cooler today, and will get colder as Halloween approaches). There's still more lighting pieces/effects (like our fog machine) to be put into play comes Halloween. Things we can't be tripping over while we're placing the mannequins or draining the batteries on prematurely. Going to still play around with the LED ripple effect light color scheme before Halloween night because the blue/green effect actually appeared like visuals from Lovecraft's story "The Color Out of Space". Neat effect, but not what we're trying to achieve, but it does grab one's attention from afar. Granted some of the rainbow color effect may be due to the orange leaves on the October Glory maple tree which most of the leaves came down from overnight due to the change in weather.

Glowing Eyes Apparition

In our 2019 ghost themed yard haunt we used two different apparition masks on our mannequins "as-is". The eye holes on the masks are lined with a see-through black mesh to hide the potential wearer's eyes. We thought for our 2024 haunt theme revisit that it would be cool if we lighted the eyes using specific color LEDs like we've done for some of our props in the past. While doing some online searches we stumbled upon "Cyberpunk" multicolor LED clear acrylic visors that were intriguing, especially for well under $20/pair. We had to give them a "proof of concept" test and here are the results:

Pre-Haunt Halloween Decorations Are Up

Since yesterday was the first day of fall and the regular "Neighbor-Haunts" are starting to pop up, we thought it would be a good time to get our pre-haunt (aka "decoy") decorations up to get into the Halloween spirit. We're really liking the green, blue, purple lighting. It helps set the mood for the coming "Haunted Bayou" haunt on Halloween.

62 Days Before Halloween

Halloween isn't all that far off now! Decided to do a lighting test of our two swamp zombie skeleton props. Still not sure what combination of lighting we'll be using. This test was purely using an LED blacklight spot light on them. We will most likely use some combination of blue, green, and black light spot lights. We may use our LED water ripple effect light, just won't know for sure until just before Halloween. These skeletons will also get the seaweed & creepy cloth treatment when they get placed in the haunt on Halloween.

Faux Candle Lantern Modification

Back in 2019 we had purchased 3 Victorian style candle lanterns that came with faux battery powered candles for the post props we had built back in 2018 (originally designed for holding corn stalks). The faux candles did their job when it got dark out, but for this year's haunted bayou theme we wanted to go with a classic New Orleans gas lantern effect using our rechargeable outdoor LED flame lights. The faux candles were mounted with 4 tiny screws to the bottoms of the lanterns with a hole on the base of the lantern wide enough in diameter to access the on/off switch and battery compartment on the candles. The LED flame lights have magnetic bottoms and were just wide enough in diameter to cover up the hole, but there wasn't enough metal surface for the LED flame lights to grab firmly onto to prevent shifting around when moving the lantern (not something we would want to have to fight with on Halloween night). The solution came after finding a set of 3 metal pillar candle dishes that were a perfect fit for the lanterns via Amazon for $14. The metal dish bases were small enough in diameter to not cover up the corner drainage hole in the base of the lanterns. A bead of crazy glue around the raised rim of the hole in the base of the candle lantern secured the candle dish in place. We can now use various different types of pillar candles in the lanterns along with the LED flame lights.

Halloween 2024 Preparations

As strange as it may sound, we're often working on future haunts in parallel to the current year's haunt. One of the things that we try to do is make the haunt lighting appropriate to the theme, but also slightly different each time out. Regardless of the haunt theme, we don't want the following year's lighting to look identical to the prior year. So for the 2023 "Haunted Bayou" haunt theme we're using purple, green, blue C9 bulbs on the house stringers.  Prior, we had used purple, green, orange for the 2022 "Classic Horror Movie Monsters" theme, red and orange for the 2021 "Devils & Demons" theme, red, blue, and yellow for the 2020 "Creepy Carnival" theme, and just blue accent and ambient lighting for the 2019 "Ghosts" theme. We will be revisiting the "Ghost" theme in 2024, but the big question was "What lighting color palette should we use that works, but's also different and interesting?" We poured over hundreds of pictures posted on Pinterest looking for a common color palette from vintage pulp horror art and things related to The Haunted Mansion and came up with our 2024 lighting color palette: Teal, Blue, Purple, Pink LED C9 bulbs. We like using the light stringers on the house because first off they provide a nice ambient lighting effect for the haunt, but they also advertise "We're here!" on Halloween night in our neighborhood. We've seen more participation in regards to decorating and lighting for Halloween in our neighborhood over the years, but there are still a lot that don't decorate or put out any jack-o-lanterns. We have a few homes that like to turn out the lights and pretend they're not home on Halloween. And because of how our house is shaped and situated near the top of a hill, the side of our house's garage obscures the haunt approaching from the east. So by wrapping the colorful light stringers all the way around to the eastern side of our garage, we're letting people know there's something of interest to make it worth while to continue on down the street on Halloween night.

The Pitfalls Of Modern LED Color Outdoor Lights

We've tried to improve and update our yard haunt lighting as technologies have changed since the late 90's. For many years we used standard colored PAR38 incandescent outdoor floodlights in our haunts. They had many drawbacks such as high electrical consumption, too hot to touch after being on for just a few minutes, easy to shatter the thin glass bulbs, had unpredictable longevity requiring plenty of spares, and tended to be too bright in many instances. In the early 2010's we made the switch to smaller incandescent color PAR20 50 watt landscape bulbs which had deeper color saturation and weren't too bright. The biggest drawbacks with those were having to have a slew of them in different colors along with the fun of having to manually change them out to get the lighting color scheme just right. Then in the mid to late 2010's came a myriad of affordable LED based color changeable outdoor lights. One LED floodlight could be any color in a rainbow of color choices. It could be dimmed or brightened to taste, used a fraction of the electricity incandescent lights used, and would last for decades worth of Halloweens. But as more and more options for these outdoor LED lights became available a new "nightmare" problem was encountered: device remote control cross-talk. In our 2021 haunt we had used a collection of several different brand LED outdoor color changeable flood lights we had acquired. This array of lights included a new fog machine which itself had integrated color changeable lights, a color changeable LED ripple effect light, and several different brand/style LED color changeable flood lights throughout the haunt. And that's when the nightmare began. Turning on the fog in the fog machine would turn off the ripple effect light. Turning the fog machine off via its remote? Well the ripple effect light still stayed off until you turned it on again with its own remote! Changing the color on one set of flood lights, changed the color of the fog machine lights. Changing the color on one set of flood lights could change the color on another set of lights (and not necessarily the same color). Turned out some remotes and devices were IR (infrared light) based, some were RF (radio frequency) based. The IR remote cross talk between devices could be at least be managed by very keeping the remote right next to the device you wanted to turn on/of or change the color on and far away from the other IR devices. The RF remotes were an insurmountable challenge because their signals carried far and wide. For our 2022 haunt we had to try to diffuse the situation by buying a different brand/model outdoor ripple light which also suffered from some remote cross talk issues with the color changing LED lights on the fog machine, but at least turning the fog machine on/off didn't turn this particular ripple effect light off. So for this year we bought a different fog machine with LED lights that has separate color light and fog remotes. We also purchased some different LED outdoor color changeable landscape flood lights lights. And there are still cross talk issues between remote commands. Fortunately a work around of managing the order of events in terms of which device's lights gets turned on when and setting colors on each device ahead of time individually was found (luckily the settings hold even after the power is turned off) and turning the fog on the new fog machine on and off doesn't affect the colors on these new landscape lights or turn them on or off. Unfortunately, the two different ripple effect lights we own are both affected by the remote for fog on/off on the new fog machine. There appears to be no standard for how the remote control commands are programmed for these devices, sometimes even within the same brand. So now we have to do extensive trial and error testing before hand to determine which light and effect combinations can be used together for each haunt and which ones have to be shelved. Ugh! 

Prop Manipulation

One of the things we hate about store bought Halloween props/decorations is their poor real-life functionality. So many manufacturers insist on only using motion activated sensor "on" switches which basically hobble the usefulness of the prop. The Halloween green lab flask prop we purchased only would turn on via motion activation. No movement directly in front of the tiny little sensor at the base of the prop, the burner flame and flask stay dark. We ended up using a small LED tealight candle with a plastic wobble flame directly in front of the sensor. The LED candle's movement was enough to keep activating the prop. The really annoying part was there was also a bubbling sound produced when activated and once again, no way to choose sound on/off or adjust volume, so we were stuck listening to the loud sound effect the entire time we were on the porch giving out candy on Halloween night. The flask prop also has an ultrasonic misting element when activated, provided you filled the flask with some water. We weren't going to risk adding water to the prop, especially since the flask sits over the rest of the electronics. The prop has a lot of presence when lit, it didn't need the other gimmicks that hobbled its usefulness. The designers of these decorations really need to think about how these items will actually be used. That's why we end up making a lot of the props in our haunt ourselves.

Frankenstein Porch Lighting Test

We decided to do a quick lighting test tonight with the porch ceiling lights using 25 watt Edison style bulbs both on and off with the hanging green flame lanterns. The ceiling lights kicked off way too much light for our taste. We're going to have light up props in the bookcase and we really need those props to stand out. Even with the ceiling lights off, our two different cell phone cameras overexposed the scene (thus why we use real digital cameras for the official haunt photo shoot). Interesting how each cell phone camera highlighted a different color. One enhanced the purples from the LED C9 bulbs up on the house. The other enhanced the greens.

Creature Lighting Test

We decided that we're going to have the Creature be our "Greeter" standing prop at the entrance to our front walkway for the haunt on Halloween. We knew we needed to use an LED water ripple effect floodlight to really make the vignette come to life instead of just a color LED flood light.