Be a Neighborhood Legend With These 5 Halloween Tricks From a Wirecutter Gadget Expert

A doll sitting to the left of a lit-up Halloween pumpkin on a table covered with a checkered cloth. Both are bathed in red light from a smart home device.

If you’ve been to a Lowe’s or one of those Spirit Halloween stores lately (and I know you have, because they’re every 500 feet or so), you’ve experienced the new generation of outrageous automated Halloween decorations — and their several-hundred-dollar price tags. Now that’s terrifying!

If you don’t have room in your house (or budget) for a creepy grandma, a maniacal cymbal-clanging monkey, or the dog-like ghoul from Ghostbusters (my favorite), you can still create fun and kid-safe Halloween frights using a few common and inexpensive smart-home devices.

For a few of these scenarios, you’ll need an Amazon Echo smart speaker (any one of them will do) and a nearby power outlet. Most of these take just a few minutes to set up and require using the Alexa app to link your smart devices together and to create a Routine that tells your smart devices to act a certain way when they are triggered.



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