DoodleGrove Haunted House Drawing Ideas for Kids: Color One, Then Design Your Own
Haunted house drawing ideas for kids work best when you start from a page that is already drawn, then make it your own. In this guide you color a printed haunted house, learn to draw one from a few simple shapes, and add your own towers, glowing windows and a spooky front yard. There are ideas for a quiet afternoon at home and a full art lesson for the classroom, and every one builds on a free DoodleGrove coloring page.
Every page here is free to print, with no sign-up and no watermark. Each one comes in US Letter and A4, so it fits your printer whether you are in the US, the UK or anywhere else.
What you need to draw and design a haunted house
Most of these ideas use what you already have at the craft table. Gather a few supplies before you print, and read our printing guide if you want the lines to come out crisp and dark.
- A printed haunted house page, or plain paper for drawing from scratch
- A pencil and a good eraser, so kids can try, rub out and try again
- Black fine-tip pens or markers for going over the final lines
- Crayons, colored pencils or markers for coloring
- Scissors and a glue stick for the building ideas near the end
- Optional: a ruler for straight walls, and scrap paper to test ideas first
Draw a haunted house from simple shapes
A haunted house looks hard to draw until you see it as a stack of boxes and triangles. Show your child the four stages below, then let them copy a finished page like the Crooked Haunted House for ideas on windows and trim.
- Draw a tall rectangle for the main wall and a wide triangle on top for the roof. Keep it a little lopsided on purpose. A perfect house looks new, and a crooked one already looks haunted.
- Add a skinny tower off to one side with its own pointed roof. Two or three roofs at different heights make a house feel old and rambling.
- Put in a tall front door and a few arched windows. Round-topped windows look spookier than square ones. Leave one window dark and draw curtains in another.
- Finish the scene around the house: a leaning picket fence, a bare twisted tree, a winding path and a big round moon. The empty yard is what makes the house feel lonely.
Younger kids can stop after step two and still have a house they are proud of. Older kids can keep going, adding roof shingles, cracked bricks and a weathervane. The Cozy Haunted Cottage below keeps the shapes simple, which makes it an easy page to copy when you are starting out.
Six ways to design your own haunted house
Once the basic shape is on the page, the fun is in the details. Each idea below starts from a printed DoodleGrove page, then asks your child to add something of their own. Print a page, look at what the artist did, and change one thing at a time.
1. Add a clock tower and a weathervane
The Clock Tower Mansion already has a tall tower with a clock near the top. Ask your child to draw the hands at a spooky hour, then add a weathervane shaped like a bat or a cat on the very top. What time does a haunted house wake up? Let them decide and draw the hands to match.
2. Show who is peeking from the windows
On the Eyes Behind the Curtain page, one upstairs window already has a pair of eyes watching from behind the curtains. Challenge your child to fill the other windows: a friendly ghost in one, a cat on a sill, a candle in another. Deciding who lives inside turns a drawing into a story.
3. Build a spooky front yard
A house becomes a haunted house because of what surrounds it. Look at the Gothic Mansion with a Gate, where an iron gate and a warning sign set the mood before you even reach the door. On any page, have kids add a crooked gate, a stone path, a few leaning tombstones and bare bushes. A lamp post with a tiny flame gives the yard one point of light in all that dark.
4. Turn a cottage into a witch’s house
Not every haunted house is a towering mansion. The Witch’s Cottage with a Broom is small and almost cozy, with a broom already leaning by the door. Ask your child to draw what the witch is brewing: a cauldron with bubbles, a line of potion bottles in the window, or a black cat on the step. Smaller houses are less work and still full of character.
5. Hang a haunted tree house in the branches
The Ghost Tree House is built up a bare tree, with a ladder and little ghosts drifting around it. Kids can add more ghosts, a rope swing, a lantern hanging from a branch, or a second tree house next door joined by a wobbly bridge. Ask where the ladder leads and let them draw it.
6. Light up a jack-o’-lantern porch
The Haunted House with Happy Pumpkins already has smiling jack-o’-lanterns along the path. Have your child draw a row of carved pumpkins up the front steps and color the insides bright yellow so they look lit from within. A few glowing pumpkins make even the spookiest house look ready for trick-or-treaters. For help making those colors glow, our Halloween color palette guide shows how to shade a pumpkin, a ghost and a night sky.
Build it: make your haunted house stand up
A finished page is even more fun when it stands on its own. Turn any colored haunted house into a little standing scene for a shelf, a windowsill or a classroom display.
You need a finished, colored haunted house page, plus:
- Scissors
- A strip of thin card or a folded sheet of paper for a stand
- Tape or a glue stick
- Cut around the top of the house, following the roofline and towers, so the sky is trimmed away and the house has a shaped edge.
- Leave a wide strip of ground at the bottom. Fold that strip back about an inch to make a flat base the house can balance on.
- For a sturdier stand, tape a folded strip of card to the back, like the easel on a picture frame.
- Stand your house up, then line up two or three to make a haunted street.
Make a haunted house street or story
Once you have a few houses, put them together. Print several different pages, let each child color one, and stand them in a row to build a whole spooky neighborhood. Add drawn details that connect them: a shared path, a fog of gray crayon along the bottom, bats flying from roof to roof.
Teachers can turn this into a quick lesson. Give each student a different house, ask them to name it and write one sentence about who lives there, then display the street along a wall or a bulletin board. If you would rather cover a classroom door, our Halloween classroom door ideas include a haunted house front your whole class can build together.
Haunted house drawing FAQ
My child says they cannot draw a house. How do I help them start?
Start with shapes, not a house. Have them draw one rectangle and one triangle, and tell them that is already a house. Everything after that is just adding details, one at a time. Copying a printed page takes away the fear of the blank sheet.
How do I make a house look spooky and not just like an ordinary house?
Three things do most of the work: make it a little crooked, give it tall pointed roofs, and leave the yard bare except for a dead tree and a fence. A round moon behind the roof and one lit window finish the mood.
Can we design a haunted house that is not too scary for a young child?
Yes. Swap the scary parts for friendly ones: smiling pumpkins, waving ghosts, a cat in the window and warm yellow light in every room. The cottage and pumpkin-house pages are gentle by design and rarely frighten little ones.
How can teachers turn this into an art lesson?
Teach the four drawing steps as a group on the board, then hand out printed pages so every student has a model to work from. Finish by building the standing houses into a class haunted street. It covers simple shapes, line drawing and storytelling in one sitting.
More haunted house coloring pages
- Haunted House Coloring Pages: crooked mansions, a clock tower, a witch’s cottage, a tree house and a pumpkin house to color and redraw (25 pages)
- Ghost Coloring Pages: friendly ghosts to add to your haunted house windows and yard (17 pages)
- Pumpkin Coloring Pages: jack-o’-lanterns and smiling pumpkins to light up the porch (21 pages)
Hung designs T-shirt artwork for a living and prints coloring pages for his own kids at home. Every page on DoodleGrove is prepared for print the same way he prepares work for his clients.