High-Tech Halloween Decorations

Halloween is quickly approaching.  So it's time to make your house properly haunting before trick-or-treaters or your fiendishly dressed friends arrive for the big night.

Halloween decorations have gone decidedly high-tech in recent years. Take the Animated Hovering Ghost from SpiritHalloween.com ($49.99), shown above. Used to be if you wanted to create a cool ghoul you'd use an old sheet and a helium balloon. But the battery-powered Animated Hovering Ghost has red LED eyes, rises about 4 feet and sways back and forth while making creepy sounds.
The Tombstone Lifter ($79.99), above, also from SpiritHalloween.com, raises a tombstone to reveal itself and recites a creepy Halloween invocation. It too runs on batteries.

If you want something a bit more eco-friendly, this Corpse Solar Light from FrightCatalog.com ($89) doesn't require batteries; instead, its light is powered by the sun.

Nothing says Halloween quite like a thick blanket of fog. And unless you work with movie props in Hollywood, you probably can't find a more powerful fog machine than this 1,000-watt model from HalloweenSpirit.com. It produces four to five times more fog than lesser-powered models and also has a shorter warm-up time. It plugs into a standard electrical outlet and comes with a remote control and an extension cord. One quart of "fog juice" will last about four hours.
You can also dress up your computer monitor with dozens of free wallpapers like the one above from  screensavers.com, which features everything from witches to flying pumpkins.

Halloween decorations have evolved from just a few items in years past to enough scary stuff to take up several rows of a department store these days. So if you want to have the most haunting house on the block, high-tech decorations like these will do the trick while you hand out the treats.

-- Posted by Doug Newcomb, special to MSN Tech & Gadgets