Halloween Decorations: How to Make Stuffed Halloween Dummies

Learn how to create realistic and scary life size Halloween characters and dummies for your yard, porch, or haunted house!

Before buying pre-made Halloween decorations, consider adding a touch of horror and uniqueness to your Halloween display with your own one of a kind Halloween creatures, characters, and stuffed dummies. Creating your own stuffed dummies allows you to customize every aspect of them from outfits and look to placement of the dummies around your lawn, porch, or home.

Getting the Halloween supplies together.

You will need some old clothes (long sleeve shirts, hoodies, and sweaters work great), old pants (jeans and other full length pants are good), lots of old newspapers, some trash bags (or plastic bags), and some Halloween masks. If you have old shoes or socks and also some gloves, all the better. You will also need some safety pins to hold all the parts together.

Optional supplies include colored tape, plastic Halloween pumpkins, coat hangers, fake blood, two by four wood pieces (or broom sticks), and fake limbs.

Putting the Halloween dummy together into a full size decoration.

Place a trash bag or long plastic bag into each arm of the shirt and each leg of the pants, making sure that the bag reaches the end of each sleeve or leg. Begin stuffing the bags with old newspapers, you don't have to use too much in the limbs, just enough to give the limbs some bulk.

Next place a big trash bag in the torso area of the shirt and stuff it well with a lot of old newspapers. You want enough in the bag to make it look like an actual person is wearing the clothes. Place a smaller bag in the seat of the pants and behind the zipper area and pack that bag with newspaper too.

Tie or seal the open ends of each bag. This will protect the newspapers and keep your new Halloween dummy dry when the weather gets bad outside.

Bring the bottom half and top half of the dummy together and tuck the shirt of the dummy deep into the pants of the dummy. Use safety pins, or if you want a really realistic fit, stitch the shirt to the pants and put a belt around the waist.

Attaching the head of your dummy.

Buy scary masks at local stores. To get the best deals, buy them right after Halloween for use on the next Halloween. You can fill the head with a small plastic bag filled with newspaper, or for a more realistic look, place one of those plastic and hollow Halloween pumpkins into the mask. Latex masks work the best because you can easily pin them down to the collar of the shirt.

Use safety pins to secure the bottom edges of the mask to the top of the shirt. To conceal the safety pins, place the mask's hair over the pins, pop the collar of the shirt, or place small pieces of colored tape that matches the shirt color.

Adding hands and feet to your Halloween dummy.

Place socks filled with paper around the bottom of the leg openings and secure with safety pins. Or you can stick the bottoms of the legs into a pair of old shoes and tape the shoes to the legs.

For hands you can take old gloves and fill them with paper, securing them to the sleeves with a few hidden safety pins.

Adding extra realism or gore to your Halloween dummies.

If your decoration spending budget allows for it, you can step it up a notch and make truly realistic dummies or really gory (if that is what you are going for) dummies.

Replace the latex mask head with a Halloween special effects full prop head. There are plenty made for theatrical uses and decorative uses.

You can also replace the gloves and shoes with fake gory limbs available at Halloween stores and theatrical prop stores. The fake limbs can be slid into the sleeves and leg openings and secured with tape.

You can squeeze fake blood, available at stores where Halloween costumes are sold, onto the clothing of the dummy for added gory effects.

Posing your Halloween dummy.

You can pose your Halloween dummy in many different poses. Run unwound metal coat hangers through each limb and bend them to different shapes to pose your dummy limbs. You may need to use more than one coat hanger per limb to get a pose to hold.

You can make your dummy stand up by placing a long two by four or broom stick under the back of the shirt. You can choose to either run the wood piece down one leg to hide it completely or let it come out the back of the shirt. Sharpening the bottom of the two by four or wood will let you create a stake that can be mounted in the ground.

Some people choose to place flags, signs, or other hand held items into the hands of their Halloween dummies for comedic effect as well.

The possibilities are endless and your creativity can help make one of a kind Halloween dummies that can be gory and terrifying or funny and friendly....the choice is yours of what kind of creatures you create this Halloween.