1000 Ways to Annoy Your Neighbours This Halloween
Failsafe ways to make your street hate you forever!
With only two whole weeks until Halloween, your neighbourhood and local stores are no doubt filling up with the usual assortment of ghoulish paraphernalia, eviscerated pumpkins, and unscary costumes.
In the old days, Halloween was just a few candles and boring horror movies on TV. Now it’s a full-blown Super Bowl-style extravaganza complete with holographic projections of Donald Trump and Taylor Swift.
But not everyone wants that.
Some of us like peace and harmony when remembering the dead. So below are ten failsafe ways to destroy Halloween for everyone.
Electrify Your Front Door
I used to work on a farm in France. One of my first memories of working here was being electrocuted on my first morning.
While wandering around the pastures, checking out my new work surroundings, I leaned against a wooden fence to admire the view.
Unbeknown to me, a 6000-volt cable was wired between the two slats of wood. Just at the right height of my genitals.
Anyway, years later, I realised the same idea could be used to scare off trick-and-treaters, and their cloying parents who follow them around these days like mechanical chaperons.
In my day, trick-and-treating was a good excuse to smoke cigarettes and sniff Krylon before we knocked on doors. The neighbours would open up to three whacked-out teenagers demanding chocolate and small bottles of alcohol.
These days, kids sing sickly songs or rhymes their parents found on ChatGPT and ask for coconut and seed bars.
So what better way to deter them than to electrify your porch with a 6000-volt wire and hope the parents walk up first.
Which they will.
Make It Weird
A few days before Halloween, knock on your neighbour’s door dressed as Spiderman asking for a bag of flies.
The next day, go round dressed as Robin Hood asking for arrows. The next day, as Frankenstein asking for blood.
On Halloween itself, go around dressed as The Grim Reaper, asking for an axe. When they don’t answer the door, start tapping really slowly on the window.
That will scare them.
Buy a Chainsaw
Nothing is going to scare them more than ordering a brand-new chainsaw, along with a range of eerie-looking face masks.
Tell the delivery driver to leave them outside your house with the words sprayed onto the boxes in black:
CHAINSAWS and EERIE LOOKING HALLOWEEN MICHAEL MYERS MASKS.
On Halloween morning, go to collect them in a black dressing gown that makes you look like Dracula.
When your neighbours ask if you’re going to work today, tell them you’re going to stay at home and play with your new toy.
Set Up a Guillotine on the Patio
If you’re a hobbyist, you could easily knock up a life-size guillotine during the summer months.
True, you might need a big garage, as the ones used in France (until 1977) were a ton in weight, 12 feet high, and had a blade weighing 100 pounds.
But if you’re one of those people who likes to outdo your neighbours, this is the perfect show-off device.
On Halloween night, wheel it out (you’ll need a crane) and display it in full view of the neighbourhood.
When everyone is watching (which they will, as everyone loves a spectacle), lie under the blade and get your assistant (your kid) to pull the cord.
This is the tricky bit.
To obtain full shock horror value, there can’t be any illusion; it needs to be the real deal, otherwise everyone will applaud and think Halloween is the greatest show on earth.
It isn’t.
So to make sure Halloween never happens again, you must do the honourable thing and decapitate yourself.
That way, no one in the neighbourhood will want to talk about death and ghosts ever again.
Have a BBQ
Nothing scares neighbours as much as when people don’t go with the seasons.
Seeing you having a BBQ on a freezing cold October evening (Southern Hemisphere readers should skip this one), dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, they will assume you are crazy.
With #1–4 above, this should be enough to keep your neighbour’s kids inside this year.
Especially when they realise you aren’t grilling chicken.
Don’t Dress Up For The Party
Nothing annoys people as much as when someone arrives at the Halloween fancy dress party wearing what they had on for work.
I once went to a Halloween party with my girlfriend dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a grey Gap T-shirt.
While getting ready, she asked me if I was OK, as I hadn’t been myself recently.
I hate that question. So we descended into an almighty row, and I ended up going to the party in what I was wearing.
When we arrived, people asked, “Who’ve you come as, Michael J Fox?
I said no, “Myself.”
Real Life Death on Your Doorstep
Tell your neighbours you’re going for the authentic experience this year by introducing real-life death on the street.
Visit your local hospital for unused body parts, organs, bones and blood. Visit the cemetery for skeletons. Scrape roadkill off the side of the road and use food waste like decaying chicken bones or rotting fish.
Mix it all together to create a slurry of death leading along your drive and up to the porch. If you live in an apartment, leave it in the elevator or in the lobby.
If anyone questions you, like, “What the hell are you doing?” Have a rant at them for not entering into the spirit of Halloween.
Then get in your car and head to the hills, leaving the entire neighbourhood at the mercy of the rats.
Give Trick-and-Treaters Marbles
If the kids and parents get past your electrified barricade (and rats), they’ll be expecting something really nice, like a Black Forest gateau, a burrito or a can of Krylon (if you don’t know what Krylon is, ask AI)
Watch their crushing disappointment when you give them a faded set of glass marbles. Tell them that when you were a kid, this was all you had to play with.
Watch the smiles drop from their parents’ faces as they realise you have just given their offspring potential choking hazards.
See them swipe the marbles away and tell you they will never come around your house again at Halloween. Or ever!
Mission accomplished.
Build a Cemetery in Your Garden
A week before Halloween, erect ten white crosses in your front garden.
When your neighbours ask what you are doing, say you recently discovered in the local library (which doesn’t exist anymore) that the entire estate was a graveyard in the civil war — there’s bound to have been a civil war in your country at some point!
Say the cemetery was torn down to make way for houses and that the souls of the dead have been restless ever since.
Out of respect for the dead, you wish that no one celebrate Halloween this year.
When they refuse, as they’ve already booked the caterers, bought the treats, made the costumes, sent the invites, move on to the last step below.
Burn Your House Down
If none of the above works, take an extreme measure: burn your house down.
The resulting fire and emergency response (you hope) will render any Halloween celebrations impossible.
Secondly, once your house has been pulled down and a new one built (if the insurance paid up), you can start weaving your own ghost stories.
Start telling your neighbours one of your daughters (if you don’t have children, make them up; it’ll make the story sound even more horrifying) lost Cuddly Bear, Cheerios the Giraffe, and Chippy the Monkey in the fire.
And that your family keep seeing ghostly images of stuffed animals at night. Furthermore, when you go to work, all you see are dead animals.
Ramp it up further by telling them that your daughter can control the thoughts and minds of other children.
They might not believe you, but once the seed is planted, they won’t be too keen to celebrate Halloween next year, will they? Think about it. If you really believed in ghosts, would you visit a graveyard?
Happy Halloween.
(Note: If you were expecting 1000 reasons, I didn’t take my own advice and set fire to my house while I was in it…sorry)
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I seem to have the knack of annoying people already, so this will add to my repertoire.
Well, you have a real penchant for weirdities, and this is a nice one. Philip, have you left the farm then?