Friday 2 November 2012

Spook Fest

A couple of years ago we attended a Forestry Commission Halloween event which left the children traumatised and since then have reverted to our usual DIY celebrations.  However, this year I just really didn't have what it takes to oragnise a party so I made very careful enquiries about local events and finally found one which I felt would fit in with our family fun ethos of Halloween   

I'm pleased to say we had an amazing time and below are some of the highlights in pictures.

Bones pertruding from flower beds.




A rather menacing looking scarecrow which we passed on a spooky treasure hunt..


The treasure hunt took us around beautiful gardens.



Chatting with witches about how eating spiders makes you 'all legs' and other interesting snippets.


Visiting another witch in her dark den and having a good rummage in her sticky cauldron for an eyeball!


Found an eyeball!


Icky spiders hanging about.


Letters left for the White Lady...


...who is said to haunt these stairs (thought to be the oldest remaining stairs in our county)...

...and here she is.


After writing our own letter to the White Lady we dared to poke into deep vaults in the stone wall.



Back to the beautiful gardens to carry on our treasure hunt ...


..before heading into the drawing room for ghoulish ginger cake and witches brew!



In amongst the spook there were lots of pretty things too.


Oh, witchy woman snapped by Hermione.  Can you see the cobwebs and spiders on my cheeks?  I was going to wear a rather hideous false nose which flashed and jokingly asked Miles, 'what if people don't realise it's just pretend?'  He assured me that people would know because they would see the elastic.  That sort of put me off wearing it, I just stuck to my very own witchy nose.



Beautiful reflections in the pond as the sun started to go down.


We gathered to hear tales of ghosts which haunt the house and grounds.


One of the ghosts was even quite sociable and showed themselves, on the edge of nearby woodland, as a glimmer not dissimilar to a torch under a sheet, whenever the children helped the property owner to ring a very large bell.



Great stuff!  Good family fun.

2 comments:

Bridget said...

That looks amazing. Good fun. We just handed out sweets. We put out apple bobbing and hung scones covered in treacle and trick or treaters had to try to eat them with their hands behind their backs a few tried but the fun was ruined by quite heavy rain!

Claire said...

It's been quite wet up here too this week :-( This was the first year we let the children go trick or treating and it was chucking down the whole time! We were soaked! It was good fun though; first time I had done it in my whole life and was surprised at how some people really make an effort for Halloween these days. we saw houses decorated almost like Christmas time!

The scone with treacle sound like a great idea. Must make a note of that one for next year. x