Halloween 2026

Here are a few photos from this year’s haunting – every year, we haunt the house as part of the neighbourhood trick-or-treating, but also in memory of our friend and neighbour Andrew Kinsmen, who lived here for many years and cared deeply about the building and the community, and whose birthday is October 30, and who loved Halloween. If his spirit is lingering, I hope he approves.

We get hordes of tiny children – I estimate it was more than 2,000 kids this year? – and so I aim for ‘magical/spooky’ rather than ‘scary.’ We invite friends to hang out, and my roommate Robin makes her special Mulled Cider with Rum (or perhaps more accurately, Mulled Rum with Cider); it’s always a really great time.

I call my Halloween project studio ‘Attelier Effrayant’ – Spooky Studio – and every year I create something new.

I have a bunch of elements I’ve created over the years, including:

• a small graveyard
• floating candles
• the Munching Maple (the carnivorous maple tree in our front yard)
• giant spiderwebs
• a dragon (in progress)
• a smoke machine and lighting
• a witch’s cauldron over a fire, which produces ‘steam’
• Ghosts who hang around the yard

Happily, this year I realized that I could get access to the windows on the top floors, and had lights and spooky cat cutouts up there – you can see the green glow in this picture. I’ve been adding more lighting, as the Munching Maple makes our yard very dark, and I think this is the first year I feel like we’re getting to a point where we’re getting the right amount of light.

This year’s project was to add a bunch of skull lanterns – I was hoping to emulate Vasilisa the Beautiful‘s skull lanterns from the illustration, and have a whole bunch of them lined up along the fence, but I only got as far as a prototype because time got away from me this Summer. However, I’m happy to say that the prototype worked, and while I want to do more sculpting for future skulls to make them look more like the skulls in the illustration, it did basically work.

I had a wild little idea to make Baba Yaga’s hut for next year, but as anyone who makes things knows, ideas are never in short supply: time is. So I’m trying to scale back my ambitions and just try to make more skulls for 2027. I can build Baba Yaga’s hut anytime, I tell myself. And of course, the dragon doesn’t have a body or wings, or a hoard of gold doubloons; I’ve got plenty of projects to work on.

My guiding principal in the past was always that any elements I add should be able to be packed flat, as I don’t have a lot of storage, but I seem to have abandoned that ideal, so now our apartment is going to

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