Rushing around like a bat? Have the goblins gobbled up your time? Are you in a demonic whirl to get your house ready for Halloween? Here are Uncialle's triple-tested tips and tricks for haunting your house inexpensively, easily -- and SPEEDILY! These tips are short on materials, downright stingy on time, and long on Halloween atmosphere! During the haunting season, Uncialle adds more tips, so visit often. Uncialle also accepts tips from other Halloweenies, and will be glad to share the best on this page!

13. A plastic plasma skull like the one in the banner above, is instant mystery. Just plug it in! For maximum effect, get three mirror tiles from your home improvement store, tape them together in a row, and set this threefold mirror screen behind your coruscating plasma skull.

12. For quick Halloweenish candleholders, get a few of the tiny pumpkins at your grocery store, either the orange Jack-be-little or the pale Baby Boo variety, or both. With a sharp knife, cut a thin, flat slice off the bottom of each pumpkin so it will not tip over. Test each one to make sure it won't wobble. Then hollow out holes for candles in their centers. Light your candles, drip wax into the pumpkin holes for cement, and stick them in. You can use candles the same color as your little pumpkins, use black candles, or -- use whatever candles you have in the house, from tapers to tealights. These baby-pumpkin candle holders look lovely either paired or massed. For extra atmosphere, get out a black marker and draw jack o' lantern faces on them.

11. For glowing tree-eyes, you will need several snap-glow sticks. The green and yellow are the best for this, because their glow is brighter. You will also need push-pins or tacks, plus a roll of black electrician's tape, carried in all home improvement stores and most grocery stores. For each pair of glowing eyes, wrap the black electrician's tape around the center of a glow stick. Make a tab with a loop of the tape by making a second, too-large wrap around the glow stick in the same place; see illustration just below. This tape tab is where your tack goes. At dusk, snap and shake the glow sticks and tack them (or tape them if you don't want to tack them) at random onto fences, tree trunks, branches, looking out of upstairs windows or garage windows, inside your car, etc. Hang a few from fishing line from a tree so they will move in the breeze. As darkness falls, your yard will be filled with invisible monsters with glowing eyes. Or surprise someone by putting a couple of these in the far corner of the basement.

10. Have a CD burner? Put together a CD of all your favorite eerie music, from Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper," to "Umma Gumma" from Pink Floyd, to classical eeries like "Danse Macabre" -- you get the idea. Play it in the background at your party. Don't forget some heavy breathing, some whispers, and a scream or two.

9. This is a grossout much enjoyed by the middle-school crowd. Run a full bath in your tub. Tint it red with plenty of food coloring. Float in it a few old dolls, some various veggies, and you have something quite fascinating. Or if a blood bath is not your style, create the Dismal Swamp. Tint the water green or blue and go with animal toys, plastic snakes and lizards and such -- perhaps even a nice plastic alligator -- and add some leafy branches and handfuls of weeds.

8. Need a Halloween hostess gift? Here's a great one. Buy a potted chrysanthemum at the supermarket, in a lovely fall color -- or in purple or even white. Choose one whose pot is dressed in seasonal foil or paper. Spread some cobweb material over the plant and add a nice plastic spider glued to a wire or glued to a flower. Add a black or orange bow, and there you are!

7.Make a graveyard supper for the children by cooking up some hot dogs and a batch of mashed potato. Get out a square or rectangular cake pan, and bury the hot dogs in rows in the potato "grave dirt." A squirt of ketchup on the "bodies" before you "fill in the graves" is a nice touch. Oblong crackers are the tombstones. With the new food-markers, you can even write the names of the dead: Frank N. Stein being the first, of course.

6. Put a chair on your front porch and dress up like a witch or goblin. Wear a mask and gloves so you don't look like a person, and you might stuff your tummy a little extra, too. When you see trick or treaters approaching, keep very, very still. Then as they ring the doorbell, you sit up and say, "Hello, children!"

5. Stuff a few old Halloween masks with newspaper or foil. If it's windy, include a brick or large rock. Then simply place the heads in flowerbeds, under shrubs, beside your pumpkins on the porch, etc. Glow sticks behind their eyes are good.

4. Print out a menu of horrible stuff on your computer: scrambled brains, toad-in-the-hole, I scream, etc., and post it on one of your kitchen cabinets.

3. Tape a ragged length of chiffon or nylon netting over the top inside of your front door and hanging down to about shoulder level, so people will have to walk through it to come inside.

2. Stuff a few gloves with toilet tissue and put the things in creepy spots throughout the house -- coming out from under a bed, reaching from a drawer, even popping from the toaster!

1. Real or artificial ivy wound around decorative pumpkins or placed at the bases of jack o' lanterns, gives a rustic feel to a centerpiece or sideboard.