We have always loved the mystery of Halloween—the cold spots, the creaking doors, the flicker of something just beyond the corner of your eye. We love being startled, laughing at ourselves afterward, and that delicious little moment when the hair on the back of your neck stands on end.

We are perfectly at home among ghosts, skeletons, black cats, crooked tombstones and things that go bump in the night.

Halloween has always felt like home to us.

For years, sometime around August, our neighbors knew something strange was beginning again. Odd structures would start appearing in the backyard. Mysterious lights could be seen glowing late into the night. The sounds of owls, hissing cats and distant wolves occasionally echoed down the driveway.

By October, fog would roll across the property as machines were tested and hidden into place. Jack-o'-lanterns were lit. Skeletons took their positions. Endless yards of cobweb stretched from one corner of the house to another. Tombstones appeared where there had been an ordinary lawn only weeks before.

And somewhere in the darkness, an animated black crow would announce:

“It’s time! It’s Halloween time again!”

That transformation became The Mitchell Cemetery.

As Halloween approached, people would peek through the fence hoping for an early glimpse. Children watched for the familiar sign to appear by the roadside, inviting everyone once again through the gates.

Inside, spirits wandered among crooked stones. Figures rose from freshly dug graves. Ghosts glowed through the fog. Some visitors hesitated at the entrance, unsure whether they were brave enough to continue.

Others didn’t want to leave.

Our youngest visitors clutched plastic pumpkins full of candy in one hand and Mom or Dad with the other as they made their way through the cemetery. And for us, that became one of the best parts of Halloween—the thought that someday those children might be grown and still remember that strange Halloween house on Penton Street.

How to Haunt Your House began as a way to share that world: the props we built, the illusions we experimented with, the mistakes we made, the things that worked, and the simple belief that with enough imagination, an ordinary house could become something magical.

This website is part archive, part workshop and part doorway into whatever we decide to create next.

We hope something here inspires you to build, paint, carve, animate, decorate, tell stories—and maybe frighten the neighbors just a little.

And every so often, when the nights begin getting longer and the air starts to change, we hope you hear that familiar little voice inside saying:

“It’s Halloween time again…”

Lynne & Shawn

The BIG Change

Then, in 2014, Halloween changed forever.

We adopted three wonderful children, then ages one, three and four. They quite literally arrived in the middle of Halloween.

At the time, we were preparing and filming our home for ABC’s The Great Halloween Fright Fight. Giant spiders were outside the windows, cheesecloth webs covered the yard and strange creatures seemed to occupy practically every available corner.

We can only imagine what they thought of their new home.

Fortunately, they took to it like true little home haunters.

Almost overnight, two became five. Lynne and Shawn became Mom and Dad, and Halloween suddenly had an entirely new kind of magic.

Now we had little monsters of our own.

We had children to take trick-or-treating, costumes to dream up, new traditions to create, and perhaps the best excuse imaginable to keep going completely overboard for the holidays.

Looking back, the timing seems almost impossible to have scripted. One of the biggest moments in the history of The Mitchell Cemetery became intertwined with one of the biggest moments in the history of our family.

Someday, when we talk about 2014, it won’t simply be:

“Remember when we were on The Great Halloween Fright Fight?”

It will always be:

“That was the Halloween our family began.”

Everything before that?

Maybe it was just practice.

Beyond Halloween

We are Lynne and Shawn Mitchell, creators of The Mitchell Cemetery in Pensacola, Florida, and the husband-and-wife team behind How to Haunt Your House.

Our Halloween work has been featured on ABC’s The Great Halloween Fright Fight, HGTV’s Halloween Tricked Out, the Travel Channel, and Fearnet’s Route 666: America’s Scariest Haunted Houses.

We are also the authors of the How to Haunt Your House book series, created to show other Halloween enthusiasts how theatrical props, decorating techniques and special effects can be recreated at home.

But creativity has never stopped at the cemetery gates.

Both of us come from art backgrounds. Shawn works primarily in traditional media, including pen and ink, illustration and hand-painted old-style animation cells, with artwork held in both private and commercial collections.

Lynne works extensively in digital art, design, photography, animation, video and web-based creative work. Over the years, those skills have allowed How to Haunt Your House to grow from homemade Halloween props into a much larger world of visual storytelling.

Today, we continue experimenting with new ways to tell stories through books, original music, animated characters, digital art, film, practical builds and holiday experiences.

Some projects are spooky. Some are funny. Some are nostalgic. Some wander well beyond Halloween altogether.

But they usually begin in exactly the same way:

“Wouldn’t it be cool if…”

That question started The Mitchell Cemetery many years ago.

We’re still asking it.

Looking for Our Next House to Haunt

And now, we are looking for the next chapter.

Somewhere out there is our next House to Haunt.

We’re searching for a home with history, character and enough personality that it feels as though it already has a few stories of its own. Big is good. Old is even better. A little mysterious certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Maybe it has creaky floors, unusual rooms, tall windows, hidden corners, an old staircase, a wonderful porch—or even a ghost or two who wouldn’t mind sharing the place.

More practically, it also needs something creative people can never seem to have enough of: space.

Space for workshops. Space for props. Space for books, art supplies, cameras, animation, music, costumes and all those unfinished ideas that inevitably become the next project. Plenty of storage for the ever-growing collection of Halloween and Christmas creations would be especially welcome.

Most of all, we want a home with room to grow all of our talents—a place where the entire family can keep creating, experimenting and dreaming bigger.

We aren’t simply looking for another house.

We’re looking for the place that becomes part of the story.

A house with enough character to inspire us, enough room to challenge us, and enough magic that we can look at it and immediately start thinking:

“Imagine what we could do with this…”

Maybe the next Mitchell Cemetery will rise there.

Maybe new characters and stories will be born there. Maybe music will drift out of one room while something strange is being built in another. Maybe the yard will fill with pumpkins, ghosts, lights, projection shows and things we haven’t even imagined yet.

And if the house happens to already be haunted?

Well… that might just save us some decorating.