Disney’s Haunted Mansion on Your Porch for Halloween

Walt Disney World and Disneyland fans will recognize this scene right away; it’s the singing busts from the timelessly spooky ride, The Haunted Mansion. Only, they’re not flanked by animatronic ghosts. These singing busts were DIY’d for one clever hacker’s front porch. Here’s how he did it—and you can too!

The ghosts in Disney’s Haunted Mansion are just illusions. But some of them are so surprisingly simple, you can re-create them on your front porch this Halloween.

Just take these singing busts, for example. One clever Instructables user figured out that all he’d need to set up a quartet of haunted singing busts was a projector, karaoke machine and a few beauty-school mannequin heads.

Instructables user TheNewHobbyist went high-tech and decided to integrate an Arduino-powered motion sensing switch (to really frighten the trick-or-treaters). But even if you don’t have that kind of programming know-how, you can still follow along with his instructions to create a simplified version with your laptop as the hub.

After changing a few settings on your PC (like installing a black background and hiding any default toolbars, taskbars and app docks), all you need to do is play this YouTube video of the Haunted Mansion’s Grim Grinning Ghosts on a loop, then project it onto four carefully placed white busts. Don’t forget to amp up the audio with some computer speakers (or TheNewHobbyist’s karaoke machine).

[Instructables via Gizmodo]