Carnival Party (6-10yr) Black Light & Cauldron

Creepy Carnival Party for 6 and 10 year olds.  We invited both the 4th grade and kindergarten classes and family and neighborhood kids from 3 years old to adult.  This party was thrown in early october so halloween supplies were easy to find.  This is very long but describes in detail how to design the perfect haunted house. 

Invitations -   4th grade invitations: Killer Clown on a black background with red, yellow, neon green and neon blue drippy looking text that reads something wicked this way comes, So head on over for some fun at Dustin and Aaron's Creepy Carnival Cookout, 12 room haunted house, space ball, games, prizes, and The Howling Mad Café, Costumes Welcome but not required.  Made on the computer and emailed to wal-mart to be printed so they looked really professional  Kindergarten invitations were the same but with a nice clown 

Home décor- spider webs strung from banisters on deck, old beat up car wrecker with flashing light on top being driven by a skeleton (plastic) with fog machine hooked up under hood so smoke rolled out of the engine compartment.  

Haunted house - emptied 18 x 22 metal building, stapled black plastic sheeting from the ceiling rafters to the wooden floor to create 12 4' x 4' rooms (3 rooms wide 4 rooms long) with a 2 foot hallway down the long side for guests to enter and leave and a tiny hallway behind the shorter back side for a monster to hide in, hooked up surround sound stereo in the rafters playing halloween cd, the front of the outside was covered in black plastic and draped with weeds and vines to look like a cave. As you enter the foggy building in pairs you are greeted by a corpse of a guide behind her you see a hallway lit by a black light, its covered in ultra violet spider webs hung to look like a tunnel going down the hallway with little wisps hanging down to sweep your face, your guide blocks the hallway and immediately directs you to a door on your right, telling you that all the doors you need to go through are marked by glowing rings hanging from the ceiling (glow bracelets) just follow the rings.   

In the first room its dark and you're greeted by an electronic witch with flashing spiral eyes and piercing voice, the room to your left is blocked by a real cackling witch lit by another black light with a smoking cauldron(pvc pipe connected to fog machine and ran through a hole drilled into back of plastic cauldron lit by more glow sticks in the cauldron).    As you move forward through the sliced plastic there is a blinding strobe light illuminating dozens of tiny spiders hanging from black string all through the room with one giant spider with flashing red eyes that was sound activated to fall about a foot then climb back up. From behind the strobe light through a window in the plastic you catch a glimpse and hear the growl of a killer clown dressed in a convict outfit and chained to the wall in the red lit room ahead of you, as you move to your left to get away from him  you must fight your way in the darkness through a wet slitted sheet hanging from the ceiling soaked in who only knows what.  While trying to get through this obstacle from the "wall" in front of you, busts a black robed demon with long clawed fingers briefly lit from the strobe light behind you, through the wall to your left the witch is reaching her bony fingers for you, so you run through the slits in the wall to your right.   

This room is dimly lit in red so you have full sight of the killer clown reaching for you from your right as you notice he's broken free from his chains.  In front of you is a dead end so you move to your left through a wall that is two full sheets thick opening from first the right then the left so there is no light at all shed into the room you are entering.  In the absolute blackness, something fuzzy brushes your face and arms from all sides (feather boas hanging from ceiling)while trying to make your way through the darkness and furry stuff you feel the claws of the demon on your arm reaching through the wall on your left.   You hurry forward into a blacklight lit room with hundreds of glowing eyeballs (stickers) peering at you from every direction as you step into the room "POP POP POP" the floor explodes beneath you (Bubble wrap with the large size bubbles, covers the floor beneath black plastic) when you look down to see what is happening beneath you a bony hand swipes at you from under the wall. 

You must move to the left into a dark room with a skull and bones hanging from the wall on your right as you move past it, it glows blue and shakes violently when you turn to look at it the demon shrieks at you from a slit in the wall to your left.  A couple of feet further to your left is a room dimly lit in orange with a small piano bench on which sits a black rat, a shreiking tombstone and something that looks like a plate of brains (ramen noodles with red food coloring) as you move into the room to investigate the lid to the bench rises all by itself and bangs violently back down several times (there is a small slit in the wall next to the bench where the "demon" can slide his fingers unseen under the rim of the bench and raise it just far enough for it to slam back down with a loud bang)    You jump back into the room you just left and move through the slits in the wall to your left where you recognize the foggy hallway with the spider webs and the blacklights, from your right a monster (same monster that was swiping at your feet in the eyeball room) reaches out from the wall, screaming for you as you run down the hallway, there is an earth shattering banging on your right (another helper banging on the outside of the metal building with a plastic baseball bat) and the witch is coming through the wall on the left screeching for you to come back as you tear out of the building in a fit of screams and giggles.      

This haunted house only had 4 monsters, but there were 11 interactive points because of the way the corners were turned. Each monster was enclosed in its own room that the guests never entered, they were able to scare through the walls in different rooms while never leaving their positions while the kids were so turned around they never knew where the monsters were coming from.  The older kids and adults loved it, the kids did it over and over while most of the adults went through twice once for the startle effect (they never expected a homemade haunted house to scare them, one woman actually went weak in the knees and had to be caught by the clown, she was so startled) and then they'd go through again to examine all the detail.   For the little kids, because this was a dual party, I designed it so that the real monsters could be concealed and only appeared if we wanted them to so the little ones could go through and just enjoy the black lights, the stuff hanging from the ceiling, the bubble wrap and at the end the witch handed out candy, that was scary enough for them.  For the kids that weren't up to the haunted house, there was a whole carnival of things to do outside  All my helpers were dressed up.. 

The Howling Mad Café:  Grandpa with werewolf make up and fake fur glued to his face was running the bbq grill cooking howling good hotdogs.  Best friend dressed up as a witch helped kids make snow cones and passed out bags of popcorn and cups of pop  Games:  Grandma and another friend dressed as witches also and helped the kids make spin art, play velcro ghost darts and spider ring toss all from oriental trading.   

My brother dressed goth and hooked a tv up on the deck with a ddr game for the kids to try their dance skills out on. Grandpa's wife dressed up as the poo poo fairy with a crown made from pipe cleaners wrapped in toilet paper with strings of paper streaming down the back, those big yellow rubber gloves and a toilet brush wand with a little toilet paper rose attached at the neck of it with more t.p. streaming from it.  She ran the poo poo toss, which was an old toilet with 3 pieces of dog pop (giant tootsie rolls coiled into little piles of poop) that the kids had to stand so many feet away and toss into the toilet sounds gross and I was a little worried it would offend someone but EVERYONE loved it, what else would you expect at a CREEPY carnival but CREEPY games!!   

Space ball - also known as a human gyrosphere was rented from the local fire department and came with its own helper, Guests are strapped into a chair surrounded by three rings that each spin the chair in a different direction.  The operater can control it just to rock back and forth or turn around in circles without going upside down for little kids to spinning wildly in any and all directions for older guests.  This was a big hit even the adults had to ride it. 

Time:  I built the haunted house by myself while my husband was at work, so it took me about a two weeks to hang all the walls and decorate it the way I wanted it.  Then we both decorated the outside and set up the wrecker, the webs on the deck and the game/food tables the morning of the party.  The actual party was free style just like a carnival, we started about 4:30, the last guest was finally dragged away by his dad at about 8:00. 

Cost: There were over 50 people at the party.  The haunted house cost about $90 for the all the plastic, staples, spiders, webbing, stickers, red and orange halloween lights, killer clown mask and haunted house cd.  The electronic gadgets, strobe lights, black lights, fog machines, and other halloween costumes were all borrowed or saved from previous halloweens.  The food for the cookout was $50 from sam's club.  The games and prizes for the carnival were $45 and the space ball was $150.  So total cost for a creepy carnival cookout for both boys was $335 or $167.50 per kid.  I don't normally feed everyone dinner and I still usually spend about $200 per party, so I saved money, satisfied one child's desire for a carnival party and the other's desire for a halloween party and only had to turn my house into a disaster area one time! Everybody wins with a CREEPY CARNIVAL PARTY!!