Unfortunately, my props tend to grow legs and disappear if they are left unattended for any amount of time.  In fact, last year a teenage girl jumped the graveyard fence and tried to make off with one of my lighted skulls.  She didn't know that the skulls were all connected and ended up with more than she bargained for.  I think she realized that it was going to be pretty hard to pull one loose and couldn't take the entire string of them easily so she tossed it back on the ground.  We had a camera set up so I could see when to activate the grave jumper and so we caught her in the act on camera.  I think it was a "dare" kind of thing and not meant to be mean, but it's the kind of thing that happens more often than you might think.

I had to make a few sacrifices last year and the coffin and grave jumpers were part of it.  I didn't have enough room to store all of my Halloween stuff, so anything that was very large got tossed out.  It won't matter for this year since I will be working inside and the gravestones and grave jumpers wouldn't have fit indoors anyway.

In the past I have tried to focus on entertaining the trick-or-treaters and part of the reason that it takes me so long to decorate is that I have to do it all in a couple of days.  If I set up too early, the surprise is ruined and things start disappearing. 

That has forced me to limit the amount of decorating I can do because most of the time I am setting up everything alone or with the help of only one other of my friends.

Anyway, the chandelier is more of an indoor prop and would look good hanging over a buffet table or something, so I've decided to focus this year on hosting a Halloween party.

Taking a tip from the candle holder, I think I can make something that projects creepy shadows on the walls of the house that move around in a very life like fashion.  It's just a sketch in my mind at the moment, but could take care of adding a bit of creepiness to both the inside and the outside if I can get the shadows to cross the windows...

The ghost will haunt the stairs leading up to the second story.

I've been wanting to combine a couple of effects that I know to make the ghost much more realistic.  Every year that I have used the ghost so far, people have been able to look closely and see not only that the ghost is not all that ghostly, but how the mechanism that makes the ghost move works.

This year the ghost will be a lot more ghostly.  You will be able to see right through it and it will appear to hover right in front of everyone on the stairs.  It may even be possible to make it look like the ghost is coming down the stairs, but that may be too expensive and time consuming to make.

As you can see from this picture I have the ghost already set up in position.  If you can follow my description below, you'll see that this picture gives it all away to those that want to know how it will work.

The ghost is hanging from the upstairs ceiling and into the stairwell facing the top of the stairs.  It's positioned so that at the lowest point in the ghost's animation it still cannot be seen from the bottom of the stairs (see the previous image - the ghost is above the light and out of view).

In this position, all I have to do is hang a sheet of transparent plastic across the stairs in front of the ghost and an image of the ghost will be reflected down the stairs.  The rest of ghost effect is accomplished with lighting.  By increasing the amount of light at the top of the stairs (near the landing not where the ghost is), the reflection of the ghost will become more transparent.  With no lights on at the top of the stairs the ghost will appear almost solid.  Playing with the lighting and position of the clear plastic sheet will change the appearance of the ghost and add more mystery to it.

The sheeting is designed to go on a window frame and then heat shrunk to make a smooth surface...  Unfortunately, I didn't have a top or bottom support to attach it to, so no matter how much I tried to get it smooth, the bottom and top kept wrinkling up and ruining the effect.  I don't want to have a bottom or top support for the plastic visible, so I need to come up with another solution.

As you can see from the pictures, the ghost can appear as solid or transparent as I want it to depending on the lighting.  In the top picture, only the downstairs lights are on, so the only light from the upstairs is concentrated on the ghost.  The bottom picture is exactly the same only the lights in the stairwell have been turned on.

If you look at both images, you can see that the clear plastic sheeting has wrinkled up really bad along the bottom of the ghost, making it very easy to see how the effect is created.

At this point, I think that I may have to give in and buy a large sheet of Plexiglas or something in order to make the effect work like I wanted it to.

I came up with an idea to put one of my old grave jumpers back together as a standing figure.  The costume and upper body pieces were still lying around, so all we had to do was build a quick base and we had ourselves a standing host...

I was trying to figure out a way to pose the arms and hands when Becky came up with the idea to have him holding on to the buffet tables.

I think it looks great.  Every time I walk by a get that feeling like there is really someone standing there.  It's almost 6 feet tall and now that we've done some work to hide the bottom supports, it looks pretty cool.

We've been tossing around the idea of putting a boiling caldron in the grave jumper's hands.  We might get some dry ice tomorrow and play around to see how it looks.

Once the tables are full of food I think we'll be ready for some serious partying.