Coolest Homemade Haunted House Wheelchair Costume

Years ago we read a suggestion in Exceptional Parent magazine to incorporate the wheelchair into the Halloween costume. We’ve had lots of fun doing just that and making this Haunted House Wheelchair Costume!

Christopher was dressed in a black cat costume (black shirt and pants along with a hood, tail and paw coverings for hands and feet that his grandmother made when his mother and uncles were young!). The haunted house was made from a large cardboard box, covered with paper and painted purple. The roof of the house was cut out of cardboard and attached to the house for a 3-D effect.

Then the decorating fun began! We used a greeting card program and free clip art images for lots of the decorations. Printing the images of ghosts, bats, pumpkins, cats, witches, tombstones, etc. on card stock, cutting them out and using spray adhesive to attach them to the house worked well. The windows were made using reflective tape so they lit up with flash pictures or when car headlights hit them at night. Cobwebs were stretched and adhered onto the roof and window shutters and tree branches. All three sides of the house were different.

The box easily folded flat for transporting when not around the wheelchair. We attached string loops to the inside of the box for hanging the box from the wheelchair. The loops in the back were adjustable to be able to adjust the height/level of the box. A small piece of 1×1 can be used the inside edge of the box to add stability if the long side is bowing too much.

On the wheelchair tray, we had an arched-back black cat we found at a craft store and a lighted skull. We also had a bubbling cauldron sitting over flames. The bubbling effect came from small strobe lights at the bottom of the cauldron. (We cut a trap door in the back of the cauldron to provide easy access to turn the lights on and off). Over the lights we put fluffed-up cobweb material and then inserted small plastic bones and skulls from a party store. We also programmed Christopher’s Step-by-Step communication switch with haunted house sounds for him to play.