Off to Hogwarts: A Harry Potter-Themed Halloween Party You Have to See

The day of hosting a party is a funny thing. Here is how it generally goes. You wake up early, trying to remember all of the 50 million tasks left to complete. You run around like a headless chicken, checking off task after task. You start to feel pretty proud of yourself, and like you actually have time to sit around eating bon bons. Then, you realize that the people are going to arrive any minute, and you still have lots left to do and you start to panic. It kills me how we do this every single time. Still, at the end of the day, everything always seems to work out. This party is something we have wanted to do for a long time, and we put quite a bit of pressure on ourselves to make everything up to Harry Potter standards. After much debate, we decided to make the main space in Megan’s house represent all that is Hogwarts, including a much beloved Honeydukes station, Potions class (with Snape’s Potions book), and the Great Hall (note the floating candles). If you’re dying over those chocolate frogs and Crookshanks hairballs like I am, you should know that Corey’s mom whipped those up for us.

Our friend Roo was the most realistic Sirius ever. This sign? He made that with balsa wood. Serious business people.

Corey was the lovable Hedwig and Roo’s wife Caitlin was none other than the greatest wizard of all time, Albus Dumbledore. Thank you ever so much to everyone that came, and for all of your fantastic costumes. You guys were killing it this year.

When Colleen and I first started discussing having Harry Potter be our Halloween theme this year, I was very concerned about it not being creepy enough. You see, I like my Halloween to feel quite creepy. But Colleen assured me we could include some scary elements from Harry Potter as well. After all, anyone who has seen the movies knows they are not all happy times. The last few movies are downright dark. In an effort to be spooky, we decided to have the front yard, a spare room in my house, and my guest bathroom include some of the eerier elements of the books/movies. The front yard was Godric’s Hollow Cemetery, where Harry’s parents are buried. The hallway was Knockturn Alley which led to Borgin and Burke, a creepy old store full of elements of dark magic. The bathroom was a zone where a dementor was waiting for its victims. We had several people mention that they were too scared to go to the bathroom at all. Mission accomplished.

An owl watching over the cemetery.

You really can’t see but Bathilda Bagshot is hiding in the left corner behind those gravestones.

Our dementor, who was just slightly hidden so people wouldn’t initially notice him, was pretty terrifying when it was dark. We also played a heavy breathing noise behind the shower curtain on repeat that sounded just a bit like the dementor was sucking the life out of you. We are a little twisted.

And that concludes pictures of the party because we forgot to take pictures of the back yard, which was the dark forest. Imagine lots of spider webs and a big spider.

Just in case you missed any of our other Harry Potter posts:

• I shared a DIY for the sign we had in the dark forest (aka the back yard) last week.
• We showed our invitations sent from The Order of the Phoenix a couple weeks ago.