How To Decorate A Halloween Haunted House

• Cover your furniture in white sheets. Usually abandoned houses that still contain furniture are covered in sheets to keep the dust off.
  
  
• Use prepackaged stretchy cobwebs that are available during Halloween. Stretch them as thinly as possible without breaking to many strands (although a few dangling threads help add to the effect). The thinner they are the more realistic they will look. Drap these across corners of windows, in top corners near the ceiling, add a few to lampshades and across knick knacks as well.
  
  
• Take down your good drapes and put up old thrift store curtains that you've slashed and torn in a few spots (you want these to look ragged). If you can't get old curtains, then purchase some very inexpensive sheets and rough them up. You can make them look stained and yellowed by soaking them in a bathtub with some tea or coffee mixed into the water.
  
  
• Be sure to position some creepy ghosts, mummies, zombies, or sinister looking people in various rooms throughout the house. You can easily make most by stuffing old shirts, pants, suits, etc. with newspaper. Use a store bought latex mask for the head, which you can also either stuff or fill a balloon and place inside the mask.
  
  
• You could construct a coffin for "Dracula" or a mummy and place it in the corner of the room. Just use one or two large boxes, cut out the shape you want, and use tape to get it all put together. Cover over the bottom 2/3's of the front of the casket with a permanent "lid" (taped down), leaving the top 1/3 open. Either paint the entire coffin black or cover with black garbage bags (securing the bags in back where no one can see the tape). Line the open part with a red velvet or satin type material. Put a mummy or other figure inside.
  
  
• Replace the regular lights in the room with either black lightbulbs or flicker candle bulbs. Keep in mind, there should be a bit more lighting in the food area, as well as in the bathroom.