How to Make a Milk Carton Haunted House

Are you ready for a unique and fun Halloween craft? The milk carton haunted house is both. It's also an eco-friendly Halloween craft that reuses milk cartons and other materials like newspaper as well as natural materials.

The milk carton haunted house can made individually or a family or small group could work on one together. Once we had talked about our ideas over dinner and collected our materials, this project took only about 20 minutes.

Once you have a rinsed half-gallon milk carton, or juice carton, the list of materials can really be varied. We're a "use what we've got" family so I'll share what we used but you'll easily see how flexible this Halloween craft can be. Kids will come up with some really unique ideas like using newspaper cut outs to make creepy looking windows or dried cornhusks to make smoke billowing from the chimney.

The basic materials:
Half-gallon milk or juice carton, rinsed
Paper
Glue
Markers
Scissors

Optional materials we used:
Newspaper
Stickers
Pomp poms
Dried cornhusks
Paper scraps

More materials you could use:
Tissues or tissue paper (think ghost)
Buttons
Twigs
Fabric

Steps and tips for creating a milk carton haunted house:
To begin if your milk carton has a "cap" opening, allow that to be the back of the haunted house. This way you can create a chimney around it or have something escaping to resemble smoke without having to cover the back roof with the hole in the way.

Cut paper to cover the front and two sides. We found that a sheet of construction paper fit just about perfectly around all three sides with very little trimming.

Create a roof from a different color or material. We simply haphazardly cut shingle shapes on the bottom edge and folded and glued it over the top ridge of the carton.

Next we added stickers, a paper cut out owl and some scraggly newspaper shingles.

To create smoke coming out of the chimney, we used dried cornhusks that we were saving for cornhusks dolls.

The window was so easy. It is a square of newspaper trimmed and paned with black marker. Later we added a little ghost peeking out.

For the front door we chose a creepy green paper and simply added a knob and some cracks with a marker.

Two orange poms poms glued to either side give the illusion of pumpkins. We also added a "Boo" sign cut from scraps of scrapbook paper.

With a few cracks and a tiny spider drawn on the house we thought we were done. Still, it needed a little something.

We decided that a witch lived there and added a broom with textured cuts. Then we cut out a witch's hat. We rolled up tape to apply the hat so that it appears to be hanging and that gave our milk carton haunted house a little more dimension.

Finally our milk carton haunted house found a home on a wooden bench. We added a few dry leaves and the kids' favorite ghost "Boo." The dead stink bug in front was not a planned add on but had in fact died of natural causes on the bench so we decided he could rest in peace right there.