DIY Spooky Specimen Jars To Bring Mad Scientist Vibes To Your Home For Halloween

If you're determined to make your house look the scariest on the block and out-compete your neighbor, a super-spooky Halloween pool noodle arch shouldn't be the only tool in your arsenal. Bring on the gore and garner looks of disgust from visitors and your family alike with DIY spooky specimen jars. Just ensure you dress as the evil scientist (think Frankenstein or the mad scientist from "Rick and Morty"), busy working on harvesting insects, eyeballs, and internal organs in your super secret lab. You'll need a few jars, some fake specimens, waterproof tea lights, and food coloring to achieve your goal.

Start by grabbing a few empty salsa, pasta sauce, and pickle glass jars. Next, clean and dry them. After you're done, use this brilliant hack to remove stickers from your glass decor items to hide their not-so-scary origins. You don't need jars of a uniform size. The more varied the jars, the better your reputation as a mad scientist who only cares about their work. However, if you're worried it'll hit too close to home, grab new glass jars from Dollar Tree for $1.25 each. Regarding the specimens, decide if you want to showcase creepy crawlies like spiders and rats, lifelike parts of the human skeleton, internal organs of living beings, or far-fetched specimens your mind conjures up like a witch's hair or a centaur's intestines. Decide the gore level you're comfortable with and go from there. Get a couple of waterproof tea lights from Submersible Waterproof Tea Lights (black lights work, too) and a few tubes of acrylic paint or food coloring, and you're set.

To win the scariest house on the block award, grab the listed supplies and a clean bowl. Fill the bowl halfway through with water and add a drop of paint to it to prepare the specimen solution for your spooky display. A droplet of milk will turn things murky. You can even take a highlighter pen and pull out the covering from its bottom to reach the ink insert. Popping this in the water will offer similar results and might even make the water glow. Now, pour the prepared solution into the clean jars (leave space for the specimens); date them if you're going for a I've-been-a-mad-scientist-since-ages look. You'll just need to water down some white and gray paint for a thin layer on the glass surface.

Similarly, age the lids with black spray paint or replace them with dirty coffee filters. Simply get some brown filters, apply a thin layer of Mod Podge on one side, and burn the edges once it's dry. Once the groundwork is laid, put the specimens in your jars one by one. Grab a human skeleton hand, skulls, plastic spiders, rats, and glittery bones from your local Dollar Tree, and look into other scary home decor products perfect for decorating for Halloween. Alternatively, open up your pantry and use unsuspecting items, like pretzels soaked in water for a day or food coloring on your cauliflower, to craft decaying insects and a frozen human brain. Whichever specimen you choose, add it to the jar and fill it all the way up. Add the tea light with some glue to the lid's underside and pair it with an unhinged cackle to complete the look. In case you go with aged coffee filters, brighten them with black lights and tie them with twine.