Scary Paintings

• To create a creepy, two-way picture that looks like a regular painting one moment and a scary monster the next, you'll need a hole in the wall framed out to look like a painting. Cover the hole with a piece of scrim, a special theatrical fabric that is transparent when lit from behind. Paint a portrait or landscape painting on the scrim.. For the haunted house, you'll need to have space behind the hole for one of your actors, dressed as a monster or vampire, to be waiting with a flashlight. When the transformation moment arrives, the actor turns the flashlight on his face and the picture turns into a vision of monster.
  
  

Mad Scientist Jars

• Dedicate a wall of shelves in your haunted house to jars containing creepy mad scientist items. You can add to the creepiness of each jar by illuminating them from within with lights in eerie greens, reds and yellows. Grapes or painted small rubber balls become eyeballs, cloudy water with red food coloring is blood and an old cut up rubber mask serves as a piece of someone's liver, stomach or kidney. Use your imagination to consider other items stored in jars or boxes on your mad scientist's shelves. Replicas of small animals, baby dolls body parts and other spooky items can all be painted and stored in gross-looking liquids.
  
  

Scary Soundtrack

• No haunted house would be complete without eerie sound effects and music. If you have created a trip through your haunted house to last a specific amount of time for each group of guests, create a soundtrack that can be repeated exactly for each tour through the house. Otherwise, simply create a generic soundtrack that will play continuously throughout the time your house is open for viewing. Use prerecorded sound effects and music, or record your own sounds. Some useful sounds to include might be: doors creaking and slamming, evil laughter, moaning, a whistling wind, a thunder storm, screams and animals howling.
  
  

A Seance Room

• Dedicate a room in your haunted house to a fortune teller or psychic who invites the visitors to sit with her at a table for a seance. She can invoke the ghost of an imaginary person who died in your haunted house or the ghost of a now-dead famous personality. Stage your seance to include either an actor placed behind a curtain who speaks in answer to the psychic, objects rigged to bang or fall on cue throughout the room, or a strung-up apparition that can be loosed to fall on the visitors on cue. This display will work best in your haunted house if you create and have the actors memorize a script in advance.