Halloween Scavenger Hunt for Kids – The Spooky Halloween Highlight

Ghosts, creepy and action-packed play stations at night – with a Halloween scavenger hunt, the creepy festival for children becomes the exciting highlight of the year!.

Leaves rustle, the owl screams, lights flicker – a scavenger hunt at night on Halloween provides children with pleasant goose bumps. Equipped with flashlights, they embark on an exciting Halloween scavenger hunt, where some spooky surprises, fun and action await them.

Especially with older children, you should prepare and plan for some scary surprises. Because a real Halloween scavenger hunt thrives on the enjoyable shivers and the desire to be creepy. This scavenger hunt is great fun for all kids who are adventurous and love scary movies.

At Adventure Friendship, you’ll also find an Halloween treasure hunt for kids indoors that’s suitable for younger (or more timid) ones, as well as other Halloween games for kids and delicious Halloween recipes.

The Halloween Scavenger Hunt for Kids

• Age: 6 years and up
• Scary factor: low to high
• Location: outdoors

Before Halloween, it is recommended to order the necessary accessories for the scavenger hunt on the Internet – so you save time and money. Because at night, not only chalk markers, scattered glow powder and slips of paper show the children the way, but also in the light of flashlights reflective markers or bend lights, which it is necessary to collect.

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Everything you need for the Halloween Scavenger Hunt should fit into a daypack. Beforehand, think about which places are suitable for the play stations and whether you want to ask other adults or older siblings to join in. Use sidewalk chalk to paint arrows on the roads or trails, tie trail clues to branches or fences, and mark them with reflective tape. In the woods, you can also use glow-in-the-dark jack-o-lanterns as trail markers, which glow like fireflies and which the children can collect and then carry. At the beginning, each child gets a strong glowing flashlight as basic equipment for the ghost hunters.

The children start dressed as witches, monsters and ghosts with their flashlight and follow the arrows – preferably into a forest or park, because there it is nice and dark and the sounds and atmosphere fit perfectly. In addition, forest paths offer good opportunities to camouflage the trail markings and the difficulty of the Halloween scavenger hunt can be adapted to the age of the children.

Depending on how scared the kids are, parents with bedsheets can scurry across the path in the distance during the Halloween scavenger hunt, rattle bushes, or play spooky sounds in the forest with their smartphones. There are spiky screams and giggles pre-programmed. 🙂
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3 Stations for Halloween scavenger hunt

1. Creepy ghost run

• Binding thread
• Scarves or eye patches
• Gummitiere and shower gel
• Cobweb
• Inflatable jumping frogs

In a clearing, you stretch a string between two trees. Now you ask all the children to cover their eyes with scarves or blindfolds. Your task is to walk along the string to the other end.

Now 3-4 older siblings or parents step out of the darkness – the children should not have seen them before! – and line up along the string. The children now walk with one hand on the string at a distance. The ghosts suddenly grab them by the shoulder, the leg or let slippery rubber animals rubbed with shower gel crawl over their arm. You can also stretch a spider web with spiders over the string that the kids have to get through. There are also fun inflatable frogs and jumping spiders that then jump in the kids’ faces by themselves. Not for the faint of heart… 😉

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2. Will-o’-the-wisp

• Knick lights with special hooks and fixing tape
• Prize for the winner e.g. a box of cute googly eyes

The task at the next station is to catch will-o’-the-wisps. For this, each child gets attached to the pants a glow ribbon or bend light. Task is to catch each other and collect all the will-o’-the-wisps by tearing them off the pants of others. However, you must not lose your own in the process!

The child who caught the most will-o’-the-wisps gets a winning prize to share with the others, such as Halloween-themed candy.

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3. Halloween Shadow Play

• Bed sheets
• Torch

Stretch a white bed sheet on the low branch of a tree – or have two children hold it. The children form two teams and each think of 5 terms that go with Halloween. The children represent these terms as a shadow play – the other group has to guess them! The kids who guesses the most terms gets a winning prize, for example blood gum with filling to snack on.

The finale of the Halloween scavenger hunt

At the end, the final task is to find the treasure. This is not so easy in the dark. So that the children know that they are close to the goal, attach to the last marker a note with a hint, for example, Find the treasure! Or you think of a riddle matching the hiding place, which points to it.

The treasure: Fill a wooden box, which looks as antique as possible, with ghost utensils, such as rusty chains, an old castle – and lots of gold coins made of chocolate and caramel. The treasure has mainly symbolic value and hardly has to cost money!

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Abenteuer Freundschaft has many more Halloween ideas and many ideas for activities with kids, friends and with your partner.

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Image source Cover photo: Groundlings Spooky Groombridge 104 THOR at CC BY 2.0

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