You know, back when I was a kid...

We used to trick or treat at night. Our house did up a "haunted hallway" and Mom would hand out candy in the foyer and invite the kids to travel down the hall if they dared. Ghosts and goblins would confound them until they hit the back door, and walked down the driveway to their parents. Probably illegal as hell today.

Then the local township (back in Ohio, not where I am now) voted to make trick or treating a saturday afternoon, 2-4 pm deal. Our response? We already locked the doors out of the hall and blocked the open doorways with cardboard. Now, there are anchors in the walls, and 1×3's in the basement. Bolt the 1×3's to the hallway walls, hang black plastic from them (it's so much easier to pull duct tape from scrap wood than painted plaster, at least if you care how your house looks the rest of the year) and put "light baffles" or pairs of partial walls, say blocking 3' of a 4' wide hall so you have a 1' gap to the left, then to the right, and you have to walk through it.

Some of the baffles were just old 8-track tape hanging from a cross bar. You got the candy, and if you dared, you went through the ex-8-track curtain, into the "pumpkin patch" made of cardboard pumpkins and skeletons and black cats hanging from the walls. With a black light, construction paper leaves highlighted with fluorescent crayon works great.

Then through an opague light baffle, into the "cememtary" where a picket fence blocked off the bathroom, with tombstones between you and the door. Dry ice and a strobe light work wonders. Through another baffle, and here we'd listen for the kiddies, and leave the black light on to charge the glow-in-the-dark ghosts on the walls, and turn the light off before they got there. Out of a strobe light into darkness, lit only by glow in the dark ghoulies.

Out to daylight and freedom, where on one occasion my friend Todd stopped to examine the life size ghost leaning against our garage. Ghost, what ghost? We had no ghost there. Turns out it was our neighbor across the street. After Todd spend several minutes examining this "fake" ghost, it moved. It then had to chase Todd through several yards to give him back the candy bag he dropped when the "fake" ghost moved.

Have a spooktacular Halloween.

Looks like the kiddies are in for an interesting evening!

You will tell us how it all turns out right?

That looks awesome! You guys are cool.