How to Plan a Halloween Event During Quarantine

We love Halloween. Love it! As kids, dressing in costumes was an incredible way to get creative, from the time we cut a volleyball in half to make a viking helmet to the time we climbed inside a big purple pillow to become a California Raisin. As young adults, Halloween was a thrill — joining massive parades on Franklin St. in Chapel Hill, then later in West Hollywood, making friends, marveling at amazing costumes, and dancing to Ray Parker, Jr. We worked at places that held huge carnivals and costume contests. Now as parents, our love of Halloween has proven genetic, and we delight as our kids cautiously approach the skeleton decorations on a neighbor’s porch, and request spooky books from the library all year long.
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Which brings us to this year. It’s the perfect confluence — Halloween is on a Saturday? And there’s a full moon? And… there’s a global pandemic and it’s not safe to go door to door asking our elderly neighbors to share candy with us? Right. Right. Oh and the people who won’t wear masks are the scary ones? Cool, cool.

So what to do? Well we love a challenge, and we’ve been given plenty to love this year. We set about building our Home Scavenger H(a)hunt, which combines trivia, word games, and of course scavenger hunting to create a fun, safe, Halloween experience. You stay home, you connect on Zoom, and you play games. Costumes aren’t required, but they’re encouraged.

How’d we do it? We’ve played enough home hunts with our happy customers to know what works best, and we took those lessons and combined them with everything we knew about Halloween. We cued up “Monster Mash” (we were working in the lab, after all), and set our braaaainss to thinking about all things Halloween, from tricks to treats.

Scary movies, Halloween songs, funny costumes, and more all became fodder for the game. Anagrams got a spooky twist, hidden words snuck into eerie sentences, and photo IDs got even more disguised.
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We sat back and looked at our creation. “It’s alive!” we screamed. We started testing it, and we’re delighted at the response. We honed it, adding more trivia and jokes, until we were satisfied with the product. We'd created the perfect safe Halloween activity that could be played from home!

Then we looked again! This was a great game for adults, but for kids? Not yet. Not because it was too gory or scary, but because the games were a bit too tricky for young’uns. So we built another one. We built more puzzles, we shuffled some stuff in and out. We keep it kinda spooky. So now we have a great remote kids Halloween scavenger hunt for any age. It’d scare the pants off you, if anyone wore pants anymore. 

We’re so excited we’ll be able to celebrate Halloween with y’all, and can’t wait to put your brains to the test. If you’d like to book a virtual Halloween Scavenger Hunt for your office, your family, or even your coven, don’t be afraid!