The Haunted Barn

Halloween frightened the life out of me when I was little. I dreaded it every year. I have come round.

In 2020, when everything was strange and nobody was going anywhere, we wanted the night to feel properly special. We were renting a house that came with an old barn, and I knew we wouldn’t have one again for a long time, so the barn became the party.

What it took

Less than you would think. Poster board cut into ghosts, colored yarn pulled into cobwebs across the doors, a smoke machine, an arch of marbled black and gold balloons, paper-bag lanterns along the path, and our projector throwing something spooky on the back wall. A string of little lights across the beams, and the barn did the rest.

An old barn at dusk needs very little help to look haunted.

The pumpkins

We discovered that a drill, with a few different bit sizes, is the fastest way to carve a lot of pumpkins: dots, stars and rows of holes in minutes, and the candlelight comes through like lace. We lined a snake of pumpkins up the front steps to start the season, then moved them into the entrance with the lanterns and the cobwebs on the night.

Will makes a costume out of cardboard boxes every year. That year it was an aeroplane, built on the kitchen floor on Halloween eve, out of a tower of delivery boxes.

Afterwards the friendly ghosts came inside and were hung up around the house, which kept the spirit of the evening going well into November.