8 Eerie Ideas for Your Halloween Lights

With fall just around the corner, it’s time to think about something fun: Halloween decorations. To brighten your home before trick-or-treaters arrive, consider these clever Halloween lighting ideas for your yard and house. Some, like string lights, are simple enough to put up yourself. Others are best left to the pros—holiday lighting specialists with technical knowhow and the ability to reach high areas safely. 

Whether you favor cheerful orange lights around your house and yard, lit-up ghosts and Jack-o’-lanterns to welcome pint-size ghouls, or an eerie blue glow that conjures an eerie atmosphere for your grown-up Halloween party, you’ll find something here to suit your style. 

“Halloween is the kickoff to the holiday season,” says David Flores, owner of Holiday Light Installations in Long Beach, California. “With everything that happened back in 2020, people really grasped onto the holidays as a mood booster,” he explains. “More and more people want to decorate to make the most of those times with friends and family.” 

A 2023 survey by Lombardo Homes found that more than 80% of American homeowners deck out their residences for the scary-fun Halloween season. And they start early: Holiday lighting specialists begin installing Halloween displays toward the end of September. 

“September 1st is now the official kickoff for Halloween time, and stores start to carry Halloween products then,” notes Steven Gogatz, owner and founder of Light Up My Holiday in Orange County, California. “The more big companies and stores make Halloween a 2-month-long event, the more the general public does, too.”

Best of all? Since the vast majority of outdoor illuminated holiday decorations today use LED lights, which are as green as Frankenstein’s-monster masks, you won’t notice a big surge in your electric bill.

Want to learn more about outdoor lighting installation? Read Choosing the Right Outdoor Landscape Lighting and 7 Landscape Lighting Ideas for Your Home. Then find a landscape lighting company near you or find a holiday decorating service near you.

Treat your house to a haunted-mansion makeover with lights in Halloween-friendly shades. Monster-green, magic-purple, and pumpkin-orange lights are traditional for the season, but fiery reds and eerie blues make a creepy statement too. You can stick to a single color or mix them up. Bear in mind that white lights can easily overpower other hues, so consider switching standard porch light bulbs for colorful bulbs.

Lighting experts have the technical expertise and safety equipment to light your roof line, windows, and other architectural features. Some offer temporary installations that stay up through the holiday, then will take them down afterward. 

Others, like Wells Outdoor Allure in central and coastal Georgia, offer a more permanent approach. They can install LED track lighting that attaches to your home’s soffit line (the underside of overhanging features), so it outlines the roof, peaks, gables, eaves, and other contours. The lights are controlled through a cloud-based app and offer a variety of colors and special effects, from twinkling to lightning flashes. The flexibility works well throughout the year, notes Leslie Wells, who co-owns the company with her husband, Bo. “Now people want lights not just for Halloween and Christmas, but for Saint Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Easter, game day, and graduation,” she says. 

For something simpler that only stays up through the fall-to-winter season, choose RGB lights—red, green, and blue bulbs that combine to create nearly every color of the rainbow. “They let you switch from Halloween to Christmas colors using a phone app or controller, which makes it really seamless and easy,” says David Flores of Holiday Light Installations. “Then you can have the lights removed in January,” 

Make Halloween night shine by welcoming visitors with grinning, glowing gourds. After emptying and carving your pumpkin, put LED string lights into a hole in the back, or slip in a battery-operated candle that flickers like the real thing. (Avoid actual candles for fire safety.) 

The simplest, most affordable outdoor Halloween lighting: path lights. They stick in the ground with stakes and cost about $15–50 for a set of 4–6. Available as solar- or battery-powered LEDs, path lights stay bright for several hours after sundown. Just place them on both sides of a walkway at regular intervals. Styles range from pumpkins, skulls, and glowing green eyeballs to quaint, old-fashioned electric lanterns that cast a spell ghostly enough to summon the Headless Horseman.  

Turn your yard into a forbidden forest by wrapping trees and draping net lights over bushes. Top the look off by hanging lighted spheres in the branches to conjure crystal balls floating in midair.

Wrap and net lights are strands of string lights that have been connected to a lightweight wire grid, making it easier to cover large surfaces and produce a neat, uniform lighting effect. The grids come in different widths and heights suited for tall, thin structures like tree trunks and porch columns or wider ones like bushes and lawns. Like string lights, they have end-to-end connectors. 

If your trees are higher than you can reach without a ladder, consider hiring a pro to wrap them. Stretch your budget further by using green as a base and having the company replace purple lights with orange ones for Thanksgiving, then red for Christmas, suggests Robert van der Putten, owner of Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Clearwater & Tampa Bay in Florida 

Another twist on an impressive light show: Wrap your landscaping with special-effects lights. “We often double-wrap a tree in one layer of solid lighting and one that sparkles, fades, or creates a strobe light effect, so your house really stands out,” says Holiday Light Installations’ Flores.

Also, make the wraps extremely tight and check that the string is pulled taut on each layer all the way up as you go, so there’s no sagging throughout the season. The secret is that the fewer staples you use to secure the wrap lights to the bark, the better, according to Flores. “Using a lot of staples seems like the best thing to do, but you’ll often run through the wire and damage the lights.” 

Spotlights (also called uplights) are perfect for Halloween outdoor use. By directing a narrow beam of light upward at objects in the dark, the lights will cast an eerie shadow on your house, its walls, and practically anything they shine on.

To create that eerie illumination, collect some large wooden figures of your favorite Halloween characters. Think witches leaning over a bubbling cauldron and mummies with their arms outstretched. Silhouettes with cutouts, like figures with skulls or Jack-o’-lantern heads, create a doubly fun effect when lit up. Make sure each piece is secured using stakes, wire, or zip ties. 

Then place a white or colored spotlight on the ground at the base of each one to make it pop after dark. (They’re usually secured with a spike.) Angle the spotlight beam upward to cast large, delightfully distorted shadows on whatever is behind the silhouette—the facade of your house, a garden wall, or the side of your garage. Experiment with the angle, along with the distance between the spotlights and decorations, until you’re pleased with the special effects. The end result? A shadow play of giant creatures looming over your yard. 

Another new trend: Bend chicken wire into simple Halloween shapes like ghosts, then illuminate them with a spotlight so that their shadow stretches out onto a wall, Flores suggests. Place the light so the shadow is as large and long as possible.

For a kid-friendly Halloween yard, lighten the mood with white lighting and off-white decor. Even little tykes are less likely to be scared by softly lit decorations and friendly, glowing ghosts. 

You can purchase simple ghosts at holiday stores, or make them out of old sheets or fabric (with a coat hanger or balloon to structure the head). Add a glow from the inside with safe, battery-powered LED lights. Use stakes to secure them to the ground or a flower pot, or use some fishing wire to attach them invisibly to the porch ceiling. The fabric should still be able to blow in the breeze.

Reinforce this ghostly color scheme with other white accents, like stretchable polyester spider webbing, white pumpkins, and mums. Add white string lights or fairy lights along the railing. “A lot of people will take white lights and run them through the mums on their porch or the pumpkins and hay to create a glow at night,” says Brooks Champion, owner and creative director of Brooks Events and Decor in Archdale, North Carolina, which provides holiday decorations and lighting.

“Weeping lights are getting popular too,” Champion adds. “They hang down about 5 or 6 feet (longer than icicle lights) and almost look like a spider web.” You’ll find lots of freestanding options in the shape of tall weeping willow trees. Some may come with remote-controlled RGB lights, so you can change colors easily. 

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Scare up a monster-sized, monochromatic look by shining floodlights on a large, front-yard ghoul. “Any type of giant statement piece—even a blowup or a silhouette—that brings your eye upward is really popular now,” says Brooks Events and Decor’s Champion. 

Giant Halloween figures are available in a variety of big-box and home stores. This season’s most popular ghouls: 12-foot “Skelly” skeleton ($299) and 13-foot singing Jack Skellington from the film The Nightmare Before Christmas ($399). 

Use LED flood lighting to maximize the scariness of these oversize Halloween decorations. Floodlights are similar to spotlights, but with a less focused, more dispersed beam that illuminates a wider area—the entire facade of the house, for example, rather than a low front wall. The shadows it casts aren’t as sharp as the ones you’ll get with spotlights, so the emphasis is more on “flooding” the area with colored light.

To add drama, consider floodlights that change color. Smoke machines or low-lying fog machines can raise the scare bar, suggests Light Up My Holiday’s Gogatz. Positioned near floodlights, they’ll make the gargantuan creatures look like they’re emerging from the mist.

Already have landscape lights installed in your yard? Give them a spellbinding twist. LED well lights—or similar semi-concealed, in-ground landscape lighting fixtures—are already designed to enhance your home’s best features after dark, from trees to fountains to terraces. Simply changing their bulbs to Halloween colors, or adding tinted glass filters, will create a gorgeous nighttime light show. (Check the instructions, or ask your landscape lighting installer, to make sure the bulbs or filters match your equipment.)

Even easier: Scrap the outdoor Halloween decorations entirely, and just use seasonal colored lighting. If that’s a little too minimalist for you, use your well lights to determine where to place your Halloween decor for maximum impact. For example, if your lights illuminate an impressive tree, hang artificial floating candles from its branches. If they uplight a wall, set a row of grinning Jack–o’-lanterns along the top. If they line a stairway, set colorful mums on each step, taking care not to block the light.  

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DIY the witching season with Halloween string lights. They’re the most versatile, uncomplicated, and affordable outdoor additions you can find. Plus, they add low-tech nostalgia, which is trending in Halloween looks. 

Measure the areas you want to illuminate with string lights so you can purchase the right lengths. Multiple strands can be connected to each other before plugging into an outlet (battery-operating options are available, too). You can run them along porch railings and use them to outline doorways, windows, and seasonal signs. Or swirl them over bushes, hedges, hay bales, and other decorations for a casual, easy-install approach, suggests Champion.

Another way to create an eye-catching illuminated Halloween display: Include a row of icicle lights (essentially string lights with dangling elements) in scary shapes. They allow you to add bats to the belfry, spin a black widow spider infestation, or turn a tree limb into a hat rack for witches. 

Looking for something more unusual? Place a coil of orange string lights around a giant plastic cauldron to simulate flames, and a bundle of blue or green string light inside it to suggest a boiling potion. 

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Scary Ideas for Your Halloween Lights was written and reported by Kathy Passero.