A spooky Halloween graveyard is a classic Halloween outdoor decoration that your family can enjoy all season long and that trick-or-treaters will get a kick out of on Halloween night.
You can add your own special touches to make your haunted graveyard as scary or realistic as you like.
A haunted cemetery is really easy to set up, and you can buy all the pieces you need and use them year after year. But don’t worry about your Halloween cemetery ever getting stale: You can refresh it each year with some new twists. Keep reading for fun Halloween graveyard ideas.
Where to Set up your Halloween Graveyard
Pick an area of your yard to make into your Halloween Graveyard. Remember, people have to be able to see it at night, so either put it in an area that’s reachable by a floodlight (blue or green work best). Or, make sure you choose an area reachable by a power source for your fog machine or any up-lighting you plan to use.
You can section off the graveyard area with a weathered-looking cemetery fence, or just use the fence to form the background, as shown. This haunted graveyard fence (shown behind the tombstones, left) is 30 inches tall and comes with two plastic fence pieces.
Lighting a Halloween Graveyard
Using lights on the ground will give your Halloween graveyard a more professional look. Just strategically place floodlight stakes at the base of the tombstones, pointing up at them. Alternatively, you could use LED candles. There’s a great discussion over at Halloween Forum about how to light your graveyard (and how to camouflage your lighting apparatus.)
Halloween Gravestones
Choose a variety of Halloween gravestones to place in your graveyard. You can buy Halloween tombstones that look aged and creepy, and that have moss already on them. They come with ground stakes so you can easily position them where you want.
Incorporate different sizes and shapes, so the cemetery doesn’t look too uniform. For the creep factor, you could by a “broken” tombstone with a skeleton coming out of it, like this one with poseable skeleton hands.
To make the scene even spookier, you could add in a light-up Halloween tombstone where the RIP epitaph and the skull eyes light up in red.
Add Zombies, Skeletons, and the Undead to Your Haunted Graveyard
Now for the zombies! Your Halloween graveyard needs a few figures rising from the dead for a spooky effect.
This groundbreaker skeleton is an clever Halloween prop to place in front of a tombstone to create a disturbed grave. (It’s also a fun standalone prop.) The light-up skull runs on 2 AA batteries.
Zombie arms are a quick and easy way to give the illusion of the undead rising. Stick them in the ground in front of one of your tombstones.
This creepy zombie is trying to pull his way out of his grave. He’s an especially creepy figure, with his monstrous face, dirty clothes, craggy fingers, ratty hair, and light-up eyes.
Add a tombstone hugger over one of your gravestones. These poseable, adjustable figures cling to the back of the tombstone and beckon visitors to “come closer.”
The tombstone huggers are available in both a skeleton version (shown) and a zombie version.(Three AAA batteries required.)
For more scary fun, add animated pop-up zombie props that will scare the bejesus out visitors and passersby.
Guardian of the Grave Pop-up figure
Rising from the Grave Pop-up Zombie
Graveyard Sounds & Finishing Touches
Put the finishing touches on your Halloween graveyard by adding props like skulls, a ghost, haunted tree, spider webs, leaves, haunted scarecrow, or ominous black ravens, or other scary lawn stakes to your Halloween graveyard. Hide a boombox behind a tombstone, or use hidden wireless speakers or indoor/outdoor speakers, or place speakers on your porch to pipe in scary graveyard sound effects.
Place a fog machine behind one of the tombstones to keep an eerie mist over the entire cemetery scene.
