I love Halloween, any excuse to dress up and eat sweets is a very good idea in my opinion! This year at Hardwick we the House Team wanted to work closely with the Community Engagement Team and make a really great offer across the whole estate for families over half term.
So a lot of trawling Pinterest later we had decorated two rooms in the Hall, and if you ask me they looked spook-tacular (he he)! We dressed to Duke’s Room and the Still Room, but unfortunately we had a bit of a disaster in the Duke’s Room when it flooded (more on that in another post). However before that point we had a lot of fun putting the rooms together and getting creative.
There were carved pumpkins in the Stableyard and spiders leading visitors through the gardens and house, potions brewing in the garden and Halloween crafts happening all week, which were a huge hit with the families. We were so busy, we had crowds of children making Halloween ghost puppets and spooky mobiles.
One of my colleagues did a fantastic job creating this picture of Mary Queen of Scotts, photo-shopped from the painting that hangs in our Long Gallery, the perfect spot for a spooky selfie!
I helped out with the crafts for a couple of days, which I really enjoyed and it took me back to my days of being a Cub Scout leader. When I was a Brownie evening where we were doing crafts like these were my favorite so it was really nice to help out with the kids activities and seeing them enjoying themselves, and my colleagues’ creativity and hard work paying off. It was also a good excuse to dust off my Halloween head-wear and wear horns and cat ears to work.
I spent the week before Halloween making decorations, haunted books and putting heads in jars. A few simple ideas from Pinterest but they all looked really effective! The slime was brilliant but I think the head in the jar was my favorite, and people’s reactions to it were perfect.
I spent Halloween night at Leeds Armouries, at their event ‘Night of the Living Dead’ which was so creative, and quite scary too! I decided to dress up as zombie butt-kicker Wichita, from ‘Zombieland’, basically an excuse to wear my new black boots and leather jacket, and was accompanied for the evening by a mad scientist, an escaped convict and a Kerry.
The event started in the evening, which meant we got to be in Leeds Royal Armouries after hours! The armouries is in a really nice area on the waterfront and it looked so pretty at night-time.
First off we were briefed in the War Cinema and suddenly a very fierce army lady came charging in shouting orders at us, I was scared already. Then we were taken on a walk through the War Gallery, which was unfortunately infested with the un-dead!
It stared off with one zombie here and one zombie there but soon enough they were popping out from behind every corner and jumping out behind us. I may have screamed, once or twice, but after getting out alive I kind of just wanted to go around again, it was so much fun!
After our ordeal we were treated to cocktails and special effects make up! I was really looking forward to this part and the make up artists were fab. All the zombies we had seen earlier had been very convincing and now it was my turn.
We all tried out a slightly different type of make up and then met up with my friend Sadie, who had been infected earlier and had been one of the zombies jumping out at us. I think she looks amazingly scary, I’ve never been happier to see someone covered in blood.
Once we were all zombie up we sat in for a screening of the original zombie movie ‘Night of the Living Dead’. I had never seen this one before and even though I don’t usually love black and white movies and it wasn’t what I expected, especially the ending, but I enjoyed it.
It was the first year Leeds Armouries had run such an event and I hope it’s not the last. I loved getting to be there in the dark and having such a different experience in a museum I have visited many times. It must have been a huge undertaking for them but I think the staff might have enjoyed it just as much as we did.
So all in all Halloween this year meant indulging in my favorite things, craft, creativity, heritage, zombie movies and spending time with my friends! Hope you all had a frightfully good Halloween, whatever you were doing!
View from my attic 