When people fill their homes Halloween decoration galore, they usually cover a lot of areas in their home – the living room, the front door, porch, and bedrooms – but many people forget the staircase. The stairs actually provide a lot of decorating opportunities to make an eerie and spooky mood of the Halloween season. If you are hosting a Halloween party or if you just want to impress trick-or-treaters, don’t forget to try one of these decorating ideas for the staircase.
1. Add some decals
If you don’t mind scaring your guests, stick some decals showing photos or cutouts of bats or mice on the risers of your stairs for a mischievous design. You can also stick some letter cutouts in creepy fonts to spell out “Boo!” or “Beware!” You may also stick them out on your stair wall and create some wall art out of it.
2. Wrap some grape vines on the rails
Add a festive decoration with vines. Use long natural or artificial vines with leaves and tuck in very small fake pumpkins (preferably like the size of your usual Christmas balls), mini witch hats, and large rubber bugs and spiders. Hang them like you would decorate your Christmas garlands, but instead, they’re for Halloween.
3. Put ghosts on the landing
If you have a wide stair landing with a small decorative table on it, replace your flowers and vases with ghosts. By using doilies, sheer white fabric, or some gauze-like fabric, create a white ghost. Use a pipe cleaner underneath to make them stand. Decorate them with small padded black eyes made from paper or use googly eyes.
4. Decorate with bones
Fake skeletons and skulls are available in most craft stores, especially during the Halloween season. Give the dead bones a chance to “liven up” your home for the occasion by decorating your staircases with them. Hang a skeleton up against the stair wall, along with gauze-like scrim fabric cuttings and let hang down. Then, fill the rails with cobwebs and rubber spiders, and then place a skull on top of the newel caps, or the endpoints of the handrails.
5. Put some luminaries on every step
Light up your staircase with spooky luminaries. Use mason jars or old food jars from peanut butter, jellies or pickles. Then, print out some black and white images of any Halloween-related scene, like pumpkin faces, graveyards, bats, haunted house and more. Just paste it around the jar, and then put your LED votives or tea light for the lighting effect. Or, instead of a printout, use gauze to wrap it around to create mummy lights. Paste a pair of googly eyes for a finishing touch.
6. Light up the stairs
Speaking of lights, you can use LED votives inside jack-o-lanterns, and line them up on your stairs to set the Halloween mood. Or you can reuse your white milk jugs and draw some ghost faces on them, and put LED votives inside. Get creative with scary Halloween themes and your available materials.
7. Use your Christmas garland and decorate with Halloween candy
If you want a beautiful and not scary decoration for Halloween, use Christmas garlands decorated with Halloween candy and wrap them around your handrail. First, entwine the garland with Christmas lights for the lighting effect. Weave a wide orange ribbon in and out them. Add some highlights by decorating them with “candies:” some faux Pixy Stix made from pipe insulation with an orange and black ribbon wrapped around them, huge swirl lollipops made from some thick rounded cardboard painted in orange and black swirly patterns, and some DIY candy corns.
8. Create a Halloween art gallery
If you like wall arts and paintings, add a Halloween twist to your stair wall – just keep your current wall decorations stored away for a while. Replace them with fake copies of famous classic portraits (like Mona Lisa, for example) and glue some googly eyes. You may also paint or draw creepy details, like blood flowing from the eyes and stuff like that. Put them on the stairs of your entry hall to scare your trick-or-treaters away!
9. Keep it elegant with black
If you want to tone down in colors, black is the best Halloween choice. Drape a black cheesecloth along with the railings and touch it up with a black leaf garland for an elegant touch to your staircase. You may place some black mice or spider decals along the stair steps to match.
10. Make an eyeball light garland
Bare eyeballs look icky to touch. Add this effect to your staircases by adding some spooky eyeball lighting by using Christmas lights and ping pong balls! Use your Sharpies to draw and color the eye details on the ball or just glue one googly eye for each ball. Then, cut an “X” on the bottom of the “eyeball” using a cutter or a utility knife to create a hole. After that, you can insert each ping pong balls to each light bulb. Hang the lights on the railings and plug it for a spooky but spectacular display.
11. Create a shadow silhouette of a person
Shadows also serve as emblems for Halloween – it’s dark and fleeting. Since you can’t use them as decorations, you can really fake them or recreate their frightening look. Instead, you can use black paper and create a silhouette of a prowling shadow figure. Cut it to pieces according to the number of stairs it can cover, making sure every piece are of the same height of the risers, or as long as it can perfectly fit. Glue these pieces properly to the riser of the stairs using double-sided tape.
Reminders:
- While these decorations are intended to be fun, creative and scary, only put those truly terrifying decorations at the bottom, or on such places visible to the person’s eyes before he or she can take the stairs. It would be dangerous to startle people while they’re on their way up or down the stairs.
- If putting decorative items on the steps and sides, make sure you have a wide staircase where there’s enough room. This will avoid the risk of tripping and falling down the stairs.
- Avoid hanging anything from the ceiling above the stairs since it may hinder safe egress and ingress. Scary ceiling hangings may also cause someone to lose balance.