Halloween Camping ideas for your campsite / campground

So, you want to have fun and get involved during Halloween at your campground? I have been throwing a Halloween celebration at our seasonal campground for the past 5 years and have lots of Halloween spirit to share with you. Here are some Halloween camping ideas for your campsite or campground.

Every year, more and more campers are decorating their campsites and participating in the days activities and it’s so much fun. The more the merrier as the saying goes, and this year seems like it’s going to be the best one yet.

If you want to organize a Halloween weekend at your campground, keep in mine that the more help you can get putting together some special events, the better the whole weekend will be. It’s a lot of work. Trust me. But it will also be a fun weekend that you won’t soon forget!

Here are the best Halloween camping ideas for your next Halloween camping trip that the entire family will love.

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Haunted trail

If your campground, or campsite, has a wooded area then this is a fun way to get the campers to get involved by having them help you with a haunted trail. We have a pretty large wooded area next to our site that we are allowed to use. So, we made a trail that starts at the beginning of our site and winds around and ends at the back of our site where are firepit area is.

Use up whatever space you have so your guests can walk thru your site instead of just walking by and looking in. It’s so much more interactive and fun.

Site Decorating

Each year we decorate our haunted trail with a different theme. I like to keep our haunted trail rated G. Because of it being a campground with a lot of kids, I want them to have fun and not be scared. We started our first year with a traditional haunted trail with witches, skeletons, and other creepy crawlies. But we made it funny by using the life sized skeletons to do silly things like kayaking, toasting marshmallows, and other non-scary things.

We’ve also done a Nightmare Before Christmas theme complete with a 10′ Jack, Oogie Boogie, and lots of other DIY characters and decorations. I also used some inflatables too. Because this movie is both Christmas and Halloween themed, we had a crazy Christmas tree, Jack dressed as Santa, we even had the 7 holiday tree doors we made from a large brown tarp. I don’t have a post about this one yet but here are some images from the day.

The Wizard of Oz theme was fun to make. We made a house (our camper) that fell on Dorothy, character cutouts, a poppy field made with tissue paper flowers, and even an 8′ tall Emerald City wall and munchkin land. This was a lot of fun to make props for. See them all by clicking below.

Another fun theme for the trail was “pirates.” We made all of our life sized skeletons pirates and had a huge pirate ship we made out of our camper. The skeletons were kayaking again and in jail begging for a key. We made a boat deck with old pallets and sections of tree trunk we wrapped with rope.

And last year we did Disney’s Haunted Mansion with all of the main scenes from the ride at Disney World. We had the ghost horse carriage, the coffin, floating chandelier, portrait wall, and even Madam Leota’s floating head. And had the soundtrack playing for background music. That was my favorite so far. You can check out all of these props and decorations by clicking the image below.

This year we are using the trail to do a Toy Story Theme. We will have larger than life sized props such as a 4’x4’x’4′ Rubix cube, a broom sized paintbrush with paint tray, a big barrel of Monkeys, and more. My favorite part will be Andy’s room that we are making out of our storage shed with an 8’x8′ photo backdrop of his room.

The moral of the story here is to take your Halloween decorations to a new level by coming up with a theme for your site and go all out!

Costume contests

Having a costume contest is good time for the kids. Kids love dressing up so why not have a best costume contest for them. There are plenty of options for contest prizes too. You can do best traditional costume, best DIY costume, funniest, most spooky spirit, and more. Our campground owner supplies us with gift certificates and cash prizes for both adults and kids contests.

Costume Parade

While the kids are in their costumes its the perfect time to have a costume parade so they can show off their cute costumes. Not only do the kids love it but the adults also love seeing the kids walk around in their Halloween character costumes. This is how we generally judge the costumes. We watch all the kids go by in the parade and do our voting for the costume contest.

Golf cart decorating

Every year we decorate our campground security guy’s golf cart in whatever theme we have for the year. Sometimes, we steal it and do it without him knowing, and sometimes he’s asking me months ahead of time what my theme is so he can get prepared. He tells me he hates it…but I know he secretly loves doing it. 😉 You can see him above during our Wizard of Oz Halloween when we made his golf cart into the wizards hot air balloon and dressed him as the Wizard.

You could do this or you can have everyone decorate their golf carts and have a golf cart parade and contest too.

Pumpkin carving contests

Half the fun of having Halloween weekends at camp is when you bring in some of the fall traditions for the kids to do such as pumpkin carving. You can either do a pumpkin carving contest or do pumpkin carving for a craft.

If you want to do pumpkin carving with younger children, here is a good video to teach you how to prep your pumpkins in advance and give the kids a safer option for carving. Or you can get Pumpkin carving kits made for younger children.

Halloween Crafts

Our campground craft lady does special holiday themed crafts for Christmas and Halloween for the younger children and they love it.

Some fun ideas for the little kids are to have them do a pumpkin carving kit, make some artwork using pumpkin seeds, decorate mini pumpkins with paint and googly eyes, make paper ghosts, and even some Halloween fun with glow sticks.

Bonfire Ghost Stories

Older kids can have some fun too. A fun Halloween activity for them would be having someone host bonfire ghost stories. How fun would it be to get the teenagers around a campfire exchanging scary stories or have adults share their favorite scary campfire stories from when they were kids. Have them bring flashlights and blankets or a sleeping bag, and serve apple cider and Halloween candy.

Here’s a website with some scary ghost stories with a ghost scale of how scary they are. It’s cute. And here is a book of family friendly spooky campground stories.

Wagon rides / Haunted Hayrides

We started offering a wagon rides a couple years ago and the kids love it. All we do is fill an open trailer with hay bails and pull it with a tractor. But, if you have some participation from adult campers, why not map out a route and give the kids a scary haunted hayride.

Decorate the trailer with orange or purple lights, use faux spiderwebs, a few fake body parts, or some scary pumpkins. Don’t forget the scary tunes blaring over a loud speaker.

You can even come up with a theme for this as well such as Blair witch project, zombie apocalypse, or Friday the 13th movies.

Wanna keep it a little more rated PG? You can decorate some stops along the way like a pumpkin patch or decorate like some tv shows like “the great pumpkin Charlie Brown, Scooby Doo, Hocus Pocus, Casper the ghost, etc.

Haunted house

If your campground has a main building or out building maybe you can all get together and make a haunted house for all the campers to enjoy. This would take quite a bit of participation to pull it off but how fun would it be for the kids. It actually could be easier than doing individual site decorating if you don’t have a lot of people who don’t want the expense of doing their own.

Here is a link to Pinterest to search ideas for your next haunted walk thru Halloween decorations.

Spooky Scavenger Hunt

We did a scavenger hunt one year and it brought the kids to our site in the end to get a goodie bag. We used riddles to take them to different locations around the campground with the final clue leading back to us. I guess it isn’t quite a scavenger hunt doing it this way but they loved it.

If you want to do a genuine scavenger hunt you could do two different ones, one for younger and one for older children, even adults.

Here are 10 different ideas for a kids Halloween scavenger hunt.

So, if you want to enjoy some family fun, join your campground in creating a new Halloween tradition for you and your fellow Halloween campers. Fill the weekend with some fun Halloween activities, have a Halloween party, or do some pumpkin decorating. The best part is getting the whole family involved this Halloween season with some fun activities.