BETTER HAUNTS AND GHOUL-DENS: SHAWN AND LYNNE MITCHELL'S HOW TO HAUNT YOUR HOUSE

Welcome, foolish mortals, to The MonsterGrrls' 31 Days Of Halloween! We're glad to be back for 2009, and extremely proud to present our favorite new home decorating book as the first post for our 2009 Edition--How To Haunt Your House, written by Shawn and Lynne Mitchell.

The Mitchells are a husband-wife team of accomplished artists and home-haunting enthusiasts from Pensacola, Florida, who spend every Halloween turning the front yard of their home into The Mitchell Cemetery, which has become a popular Halloween attraction in Pensacola. The Mitchell Cemetery was featured in Fearnet.com's 2007 series Route 666: America's Scariest Haunted Houses, and won Best Yard Haunt for 2007 from the Haunt X Awards (an awards series for home haunters). Now the Mitchells have compiled their mad science into a self-published book entitled How To Haunt Your House, which was released this year. There are already mutterings of a second volume of how-to's planned for 2010.

Folks, this book is nothing less than a skeleton key to the Haunted Mansion. The beautiful photographs of the Mitchells' work, as well as their clear, concise step-by-step instructions for turning your own domicile into a Dream Spookhouse to be reckoned with, makes this terrorific tome a must-have for the Halloween decorator. It shows you how to construct tombstones, cemetery fences, and small details such as fence finials and so forth using simple items such as PVC pipe, styrofoam and hot glue. You can build such items as an endless mausoleum, a perpetually-drinking ghoul fountain, your own Pepper's-Ghost effect (still used in the Disneyland Haunted Mansion to this day), working prop candles from PVC pipe and hot glue, and any number of tombstones that look miles better than the cheap stuff at discount stores. The Mitchells also have a website, www.howtohauntyourhouse.com, where this book can be purchased. The site also contains pictures and videos of the Mitchells' nutty doings and lots of cool downloads (one of which is a fantastic pattern for a seance-board tabletop!) for your own experiments and spooky doings.

We just can't say enough good things about this book. If you have an itch to create your own spookhouse for Halloween but don't know where to begin, this book is the item to have as a starting point--simple, precise, and absolutely amazing. Get your copy now.

If you're in the Pensacola area on October 31, the Mitchell Cemetery will be open from dusk until 10:30 p.m. at 6701 Penton Street, Pensacola, Florida.

To see the Mitchells' very beautiful fine art, check out their main website at www.rabbitholeproductions.com.