Drat. Our house has lever operated casement windows and it would be a piece of cake to do this, but my wife just said that she wants a hotel room if we do this.
The old standby at our house is the Monster in a Box. This is an old shipping crate with a washing machine motor mounted inside. A steel bar is mounted off-center to the motor’s shaft, and the whole thing gets wrapped in chains for Halloween. When the motor is plugged in (yep, just as someone is about to knock), the box shakes, jumps around and rattles the earth it sits on.
What I’d really like to do is run a fog machine on the roof and use a projection monitor to play old Boris Karloff movies on the curtain of fog spilling off of the roof, but I’m too cheap to rent a fog machine and I don’t think that a CO[sup]2[/sup] setup would produce enough fog.
Actually, I’ve always wanted to play ‘Tim the Enchanter’ in the front yard, but I never could be bothered to trim the trees and get the explosives permits. :rolleyes:
Clothahump, I like the “Death takes a walk” idea. Mind if I borrow it sometime?
I can’t get to it at work–is that the one with the two kids who stayed up late watching movies and the parents that pull the best gag on the face of the Earth? 'Cause that one makes me laugh so hard I cry, every single time.
One year, I just decided to whip the door open whenever the T or T’ers would show up on the porch, sort of the way Kramer would make his entrance on Seinfeld.
Once, a neighbor dressed up as a scarecrow, and sat motionless on the front porch while trick-or-treaters approached, rang the doorbell, received candy, and started to leave–then would jump. Very funny.
Decidedly low tech, but years ago a neighbor man would run a hose from inside his house to the front porch…he had a funnel like opening inside the house and a funnel like thing on the hose on the porch, hidden behind a plant. He only had a tiny little light on the porch and when the kids would come he would bellow in a deep scary voice, “Ring the doorbell!” through the hose and the kids could just hear the voice and not see anyone standing next to them.
It was very successful as kids talked about that every year, and they loved to take their younger brothers and sisters to that house and watch their reactions.
My guess is that a high tech version with a hidden speaker would have the same desired effect.
While in high school, we did the chainsaw gag at the exit of a haunted house we were running as part of a fundraiser for the Debate club. Just when you thought it was over and you were safe outside, we had a very scary looking dude run up rev it up.
It was great fun, until we rushed an undercover police officer maybe 10 seconds after he left the house (our timing was simply a little late). He actually drew his weapon and almost shot my classmate. Our teacher made us stop after that.
I’m always worried about scaring the little kids too much. We usually just put plastic cockroaches in candy dish - they generate some pretty good screams once in a while.
What’s an undercover officer doing, going armed into a haunted house where people WILL be jumping out of the darkness? The cop sounds like a mental midget.
I got to pull one of the “hed and scare” tricks- and it wasn’t Halloween. I was living in an apartment house with a lagre common porch. The landlord had hired an older guy to paint the place; while I sat inside , blissfully ignorant of everything but the TV, he had a heart attack and died on the porch. I heard the cop radios and poked my head out the door to be surprised with a body covered by a tarp, with just the boots sticking out.
It took several hours (!) for the coroner to get there, so the body lay where he fell. My roommate and his buddy came by and saw what was going on, then they left to go somewhere for a while. The coroner came while they were gone and the dead guy was taken to the morgue, but the tarp was still on the porch.
My rommate came home and said that the buddy, Ed, would be along in a few minutes. I got my work boots out, put them on, and laid down in the smae position that the body occupied earlier.
Ed came onto the porch, and my roommate was at the open door. He said “They didn’t come to get the body yet.” Ed stepped over me, and I grabbed him by the ankle.
I never heard a guy scream like that before. He must have jumped ten feet away from me; I was laughing too hard to really notice.
It was too bad about the poor painter, but you so rarely get a setup like that…
I had just thought of opening the door really fast only on the spur of the moment, and unfortunately, I am much closer in height and build to George Costanza than I am to Cosmo Kramer.
Ours was the ‘mad scientist’ set-up. Whoever would wear the white lab coat, liberally splattered with fake blood, and offering up gory implements while shouting things like “Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains!” or “Let me operaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate on you, litttle booooooooooy/giiiiiiiiiiiiirl!” The best part was luring them to the nearby table to pick up their treats. Only thing was that they had to go through previous ‘experiments’ to get the prize.
So, what did we have? Not much compared to some of the others listed above, but many seemed to be totally creeped out by having to FEEL the ‘dissected’ eyeballs (slightly wet grapes) and the ‘transplanted,’ and obviously demolished, brain (spaghetti with whatever bits makes you shiver).
Yep, I loved it and only wish I’d ever lived somewhere as an adult that I could pull some of this stuff myself.
