Halloween Touch & Feel Ideas

Entertain party guests or passers-by with creepy things in Halloween touch and feel boxes. Clearly label each item with a Halloween-themed name and let guests try to guess what they are really touching. In the spooky spirit of Halloween, the bigger the "eww" factor, the better. Limit the number of touching items or adjust the difficulty of guessing what the item really is to the age group of your guests.

The presentation can make or break your touch-and-feel station. Create the ambiance you want with your setup. Keep things fairly simple for a classroom party or carnival by cutting a hand-sized hole in the top of boxes. Use medium-size boxes with lids of the same sizes. Spray paint the boxes and lids black or drape the entire display with a black cloth with corresponding holes cut out. Cover the display with fake cobwebs and spiders. Alternatively, set up a fake autopsy room and have guests reach under a sheet to feel inside a dummy or stuffed clothes.

Fill a box or container with dirt or pudding to resemble dirt or mud for this Halloween touch and feel box. Hide a hand under the dirt and mix in gummy worms and plastic spiders. Use a realistic-feeling prop that looks and feels like a severed hand or make your own. Fill a surgical glove with rice or water and freeze it in a hand shape. If you want to scare your guests, only allow one guest into the room at a time and have someone hiding under the table with his hand in the box. Your mischievous helper can grab the guest's hand when he reaches inside the box.

Decaying body parts are eery and creepy items that feel weird to touch. Rub vegetable oil on a latex glove or flour tortilla to feel like slimy skin and stuff it with popcorn to feel like a skeleton. Sprinkle in a few fake nails and potato chips as scabs. Carve ears out of bell peppers or break pretzels into ear shapes. Wash chicken bones and let them serve as substitute skeleton parts, or carve bones out of carrots. Use popcorn kernels as teeth.

Use various food items for slimy and gooey body parts. Substitute frozen or peeled grapes for eyeballs, canned peaches as a liver, cold spaghetti noodles as intestines, a baggie of pudding for a heart, and freeze, then thaw and carve a large piece of tofu to look and feel like brains. Add baby hot dogs as toes, carved cheese sticks for fingers and miscellaneous doll parts as other body parts. Use oil, water, ketchup or other wet materials to keep the ingredients gooey and more realistic feeling, which will add to the creepy factor.

Turn your Halloween shindig into the event of the season by filling this Halloween touch and feel box with prizes for each participant. Fill it with inexpensive little doodads that all kids love and instruct each child to rummage around and choose one item to take home for keeps. Prizes can include wrapped candies, pencils and pens and small toys such as bouncy balls, glow sticks, stickers and flash rings.