Create Spooky Foggy Halloween Graves

The foggy grave site display was very popular on Halloween night. Every trick-or-treater that came to our door stopped and stared at the grave.

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What you will need to create a foggy grave site for Halloween.

• Fog Machine
• Cooler
• Small Fan
• PVC Pipe
• Drill
• Caulk
• Wire Mesh

To make the fog stay lower to the ground, we attempt to chill the fog by using the cooler. We will run the fog through the cooler through a tunnel of ice to cool the fog.

I used the basic 400w fog machine. I bought the fog machine at Halloween USA for $29, with a gallon of fog juice for $10. I am sure you could find one even cheaper right after Halloween.

I used a basic 38-quart cooler with wheels. (Igloo Wheelie Cool). It just happened to be the cooler I had available. I didn’t want to buy a new cooler to drill holes into so I opted to use our old cooler for this project.

I used 2 inch PVC pipe for the fog inlet and outlet ports. So I drilled about a 2 ½ inch hole on opposite ends of the cooler.

I then pushed in the PVC pipe so about 2 inches of the pipe was sticking into the cooler and out of the cooler. I did this on both ends of the cooler.

Then take your wire mess and cut it the length of the inside of the cooler so that it overlaps the PVC on the inside, this will give you plenty of room to secure down the wire mesh. The wire mesh will be wrapped into the shape of the pipe and secured down with some pipe clamps.

Once I had the pipe just how I wanted I sealed up the ends of the PVC around the cooler with a little bit of caulk to keep the fog from escaping out the small gaps. (The fog will escape out any exit it can find). So the better you can seal it the better your fog contraption will work.

Now I took a 2 inch 90 degree elbow and curved the pipe up and around to the top of the cooler so I could place the fog machine on top of the cooler. You could just leave the fog machine on the ground next to the cooler and pump it straight in as well. I wanted to have my fog machine sit on top, just to keep the whole setup more compact.

The final pipe setup looks like the picture below.

I used the 400 watt fog machine with a fog timer. This setup lets you adjust the duration and interval of the fog bursts. A 400 watt fog machine needs time to reheat before running a fog burst. The timer allows you to set the length of the burst, instead of just running until the heater needs to re-heat. It also allows you to set the interval between bursts.

This enables a more consistent flow of fog. I was able to improve this flow quite a bit more by adding the 12 volt CPU fan just inside the PVC pipe at the outlet of the pipe. The fan really helped keep the fog moving more consistently through the system. Since much of the fog will stay inside the pipes between fog bursts, the fan would suck out this spare fog between the bursts to keep at least a small flow of fog running though the pipes.

The cooler, when it is filled with ice. You can see the pipe on the left side is turned to open the lid. This is why it is a good idea leave all the pipe loose so you can move it around as needed. It is still tight enough so the fog does not seep out any of the joints.

Running the fog machine through the cooler before the grave site pipe is installed.

Now time to create the grave piping.

For the fog outlet from the cooler I used 2 90 degree elbows to bring the pipe down so it was just below the level of the ground. I kept all the joints loose to allow for easy adjustments. I used a 2 inch to ½ inch reducer to run to the grid used for the grave site. Then a 2 foot long ½ PVC pipe came from the reducer. I drilled holes into the 2nd half of this pipe.

Then I placed T-joints about every foot and added pieces of ½ PVC to each t-joint with a cap on the end. I also drilled holes in each of these pieces. This grid can really be whatever size you need for your area. My grave was a little bit smaller than an actually grave just so it would fit in the space I wanted.

Once the grid was complete I buried under about an inch of mulch to cover all the piping. I placed a headstone at the end of the grave site The headstone helped to hide the fog machine and cooler.

Now turn on the fog machine and the fan, and watch your grave come to life!

Please leave some comments below!