Browsing the archives for the denver halloween category.
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Simple & Fun Halloween Pranks

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Halloween is a notorious time for pulling pranks on friends or even total strangers! Pranks can be fun for everyone as long they are done tastefully and nobody gets hurt. Here are some pranks you can try and pull off yourself come next Halloween.

Party Pranks

1.) As your guests arrive at your Halloween party, have someone dress up and scare people as they come into your house. Most of your guests won’t see it coming and it should all be for a good laugh.

2.) In the food you are serving at your Halloween party, add a fake finger or bugs to the plate or dish. Some unlucky guest will find it and be sure to scream. You could also apply this prank to someone’s glass. Find one of the fake fly’s in an ice cube and make a drink for one of your friends!

3.) While working in the kitchen, pretend to accidentally chop off one of your fingers and have some fake blood and a fake finger and you will be sure to get someone.

On your Own

1.) Create a “dummy” creature and place in your yard to attract attention of those who come and trick and treat on Halloween. Find a hidden spot across from this object and jump out and scare those unlucky trick or treaters! If you make your “dummy” stick out enough you will have no problem hiding!

2.) When you go up to knock on someone’s door when they answer fill their bowl up with candy before they can offer you any

3.) Dress up in a hospital patient outfit, mess up your hair and use some costume effects and create a few visible scars on your body and walk around saying comments that don’t make sense. You will be surprised how many people it freaks out!

If you are looking for more Halloween tricks, check out a Halloween blog online. For other Halloween ideas like places to go on Halloween or fun Denver Haunted Houses to attend, just check do a local Google search and you shouldn’t have trouble finding some fun!

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The History of Trick-or-Treating

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The practice of dressing up in costumes and begging door to door at Denver Haunted Houses for treats on holidays dates back to the Middle Ages and includes Christmas wassailing. Trick-or-treating resembles the late medieval practice of souling, when poor folk would go door to door at Denver Haunted Houses on Hallowmas (November 1), receiving food in return for prayers for the dead on All Souls Day (November 2). It originated in Ireland and Britain, although similar practices for the souls of the dead were found as far south as Italy. Shakespeare mentions the practice in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593), when Speed accuses his master of “puling like a beggar at Hallowmas.”

However, there is no evidence that souling was ever practiced in North America, where trick-or-treating may have developed independent of any Irish or British antecedent. The custom of wearing costumes and masks at Halloween goes back to Celtic traditions of attempting to copy the evil spirits or placate them, In Scotland for instance where the dead were impersonated by young men with masked, veiled or blackened faces, dressed in white. Ruth Edna Kelley, in her 1919 history of the holiday, The Book of Hallowe’en, makes no mention of ritual begging in the chapter “Hallowe’en in America.” Kelley lived in Lynn, Massachusetts, a town with about 4,500 Irish immigrants, 1,900 English immigrants, and 700 Scottish immigrants in 1920. The thousands of Halloween postcards produced between the turn of the 20th century and the 1920s commonly show children but do not depict trick-or-treating. The editor of a collection of over 3,000 vintage Halloween postcards writes,

There are cards that mention the custom or show children in costumes at the doors of Denver Haunted Houses, but as far as we can tell they were printed later than the 1920s and more than likely even the 1930s. Tricksters of various sorts are shown on the early postcards, but not the means of appeasing them.

Thus, although a quarter million Scots-Irish immigrated to America between 1717 and 1770, the Irish Potato Famine brought more than a million immigrants to North America in 1845–1849, and British and Irish immigration to America peaked in the 1880s, ritualized begging on Halloween was virtually unknown in America until generations later.

The earliest known reference to ritual begging on Halloween in English speaking North America occurs in 1911, when a newspaper in Kingston, Ontario, near the border of upstate New York, reported that it was normal for the smaller children to go street guising on Halloween between 6 and 7 p.m., visiting shops and neighbors to be rewarded with nuts and candies for their rhymes and songs. Another isolated reference to ritual begging on Halloween appears, place unknown, in 1915, with a third reference in Chicago in 1920.

The earliest known use in print of the term “trick or treat” appears in 1927, from Blackie, Alberta, Canada:

Hallowe’en provided an opportunity for real strenuous fun. No real damage was done except to the temper of some who had to hunt for wagon wheels, gates, wagons, barrels, etc., much of which decorated the front street. The youthful tormentors were at back door and front of Denver Haunted Houses demanding edible plunder by the word “trick or treat” to which the inmates gladly responded and sent the robbers away rejoicing.

Trick-or-treating does not seem to have become a widespread practice until the 1930s, with the first U.S. appearances of the term in 1934, and the first use in a national publication occurring in 1939.

(Source: wikipedia.org)

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Choosing A Haunted House

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If you’re like most people who stretch Halloween into a month-long frightfest, you’ll be looking for a good Haunted House here in the next couple of weeks.  Haunted Houses have become big business in recent years and they’re not exactly cheap, so I recommend doing a little research before heading out for the night.  Here are a few things that you’ll want to know before making your trip out for the evening:

1. Know what time the Haunted House closes. Some of these attractions can be a bit of a drive and it’s a real bummer to get rejected because they are closed or the line is too long to get in before they close.  (I learned this the hard way last year.)  Some haunted houses have a number you can call to check on the status of the line but in all cases just get there early!

2 . Check on the ticket options. The average price is around $15 per person, but you might want to see if there is a “VIP” ticket and online ticketing options.  The VIP tickets will cost a little more, but could save you a lot of time.

And don’t forget to find out if there are any discounts available.  Some of the venues give a small discount with a canned food donation.

3. Get the scoop on the the “fright factor”. Ask friends and co-workers to see which ones they like/dislike and how scary they are before choosing your Haunted House.   Picking a Haunted House is like picking salsa – do you want Mild, Medium or Hot?

4. Who are you going with. When you ask your friends, co-workers, and check the review boards about the particular haunted houses you need to keep in mind who you are going with.  Are you planning on having a few beers and going with your buddies?  Are you planning on attending with a younger child or girlfriend who might not appreciate the blood and gore.  Keep this in mind when choosing a haunted house!

Here are two websites that are good resources for a lot of this information.   Haunted Colorado | Haunted House Guide

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How to Make your Denver House into A Haunted Mansion on Halloween

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Halloween is coming and your kids are begging you to turn your home into a haunted house. The only problem is, you don’t know where to start. With today’s great Halloween decorations, a few black trash bags and a lot of imagination, anyone can create haunted houses to die for. Here are some tips that will help get you there:

Outside

The experience should begin before your visitors step foot into the house. Start by blacking out your windows. Hang black trash bags on the inside of them. Hang some strings of Halloween lights on your railings or lay them in the bushes. Replace any porch lights with colored bulbs. A black light on your porch shining on some glow-in-the-dark creatures also creates an eerie effect.

If you have a porch, put some fake spider webs in the corners. You can also lay some in the bushes in front of the house. Be sure to hang fake spiders around to go with the webs! Black cats and jack-o-lanterns can also add to the ambiance of a Denver haunted house.

Your plain old door won’t work – decorate it to look like a coffin. Buy some Styrofoam gravestones to put on your lawn or make them out of spare plywood or lumber and gray paint. Get a recording of scary sounds and scary music and play it.

Inside

Set the tone for your haunted house right as the visitors step into the front door. Take some old pants and an old shirt and stuff them. Top them off with a head made from a bleach bottle and an old hat. Hang the “body” from a nearby light fixture. Place several plastic spiders and fake webs throughout the entryway to keep him company.

Close off rooms that aren’t being used. Decorate the doors like coffins or cover with black trash bags. Try to secure some crime scene tape and drape across the doors. If you want to add to the horror, place someone behind the closed doors and have them jump out periodically and scare your guests.

Place a wide variety of Halloween decorations in corners throughout the house. Buy or make some gruesome props and put them throughout the rooms. Dry ice can create some great fog, but be careful to place it where it can’t be touched as it can burn the skin if touched.

Hang things from the ceilings that will brush against your visitors as they walk through the house. Yarn that has been dampened can feel pretty creepy when it brushes against someone’s face. If you’re using black lights in the house, be sure to use black thread instead of fishing line to hang things. The fishing line will react to black lights.

Create a laboratory by filling bowls with gross-feeling food items that will represent body innards. Have someone who has a great Dr. Frankenstein voice lead blindfolded visitors through the laboratory, encouraging them to touch the different items with their hands. Expect to hear a lot of “Yuk” and “Ooh, gross!”

Once you have your Denver haunted house set up, walk through it as though you were a visitor. Check out the Halloween Decorations and if you are 100% convinced that it is as scary and haunting as you can make it, then relax. It’s sure to be a huge success!

(Source: Joseph L Wilson)

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Some Funny Halloween Pranks

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Halloween is a great time of the year when families and friends get together, everyone is happy but Halloween is not only for treats. There are a variety of tricks that can be performed on this special day. Although nowadays a lot of people do harmful and terrible tricks such as throwing eggs, this is very wrong to do. Tricks should only be for fun purposes and not to cause harm to people, so keeping that in mind there are a few traditional tricks which you may want to do to give people a freight!

First and foremost you may want to freak people out; there are a few things which you can do to do this. First is by knocking on there door and placing some sweets or candy into there bowl or hand and then walking away, this is bound to spook people out.

Next you could try to dress up as someone scary, but not traditional scary as people know what to expect. A great example is to just mess up your hair a bit and wear a wide hospital gown. You should then get some fake blood which you can buy from stores and place some of this over the gown, you should also get some white foundation and some black eyeliner to make you look a bit tired. Once you are ready you should then knock on someone’s door and walk around there lawn in a daze saying things like “I’m not crazy, I will show them all” and just keep on repeating this again and again, you will definitely give people a scare.

If you are not going trick or treating yourself and would just like to stay in the comfort of your home you can very much scare the trick or treaters. Basically before the night begins you should fill your front porch full of toilet paper. Then when trick or treaters knock at the door you should blame them and pretend to start getting very angry. They will be in a shock and you will know the truth, it should be hilarious.

Halloween in Denver is a great time but just make sure that you do not take your tricks to an extreme level, as it could potentially ruin the whole event for others. Take things slowly, be creative and remember throwing eggs is not fun. If you think of your tricks a little more in depth I am sure that you will have a much better time.

If you have played a clever trick in the past, please share it with us!  We would love to hear about it..

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