Freaking out little boys

It's funny that things never go exactly the way you would expect with kids.
We were throwing a Spooky Supper Halloween party for our grandsons who live in the area, sort of a turnaround because they weren't included in Grandma's Tea Party for the girls.
We decided to keep it simple and sort of silly rather than gross and scary because frankly, I don't do well with gross and scary.

Connor getting wrapped

Kyle the happy mummy

Besides the ages we were working with range from 6-12. We had a mummy wrap contest, a Horcrux Hunt with edible snakes and Ring-Pops and a spooky story with dried apricot ears and boiled cauliflower brains, nothing too horrid. We wrapped hot dogs in breakstick dough so we could have mummys for dinner.
Instead of a spook alley with chainsaws and dripping blood, we opted for a couple of jokes.
In our living room, we set up a tent and draped it in black cloth. Then we threw in a couple of red plastic bats we have hanging around and hung a warning sign "Danger, Rare Bats!!"
We put out a tunnel for the kids to crawl through and set up a blinking light inside.
Then we put a bunch of toy baby rattles inside a cauldron at the top of a tower built out of big, plastic barrels.
Again, we hung a warning sign that said "Careful, Keep Back, Baby Rattlers!"
We led the kids in one by one and let them tiptoe carefully to the edge of the barrels so they could peek inside. As soon as they lifted the lid, we rattled some pebbles in a can.
Every one of them jumped.
Every one took it seriously.
Some of the bigger ones wouldn't go down the tunnel to see the bats.
One child said he could hear the bats moving around in there and he wasn't taking any chances.

It's a wrap for Scott

He hung back until he could see that some of his cousins went in and came back safely.
It was interesting to me how wholly they believed what grandpa and I said.
If we told them there were live snakes in our barrel, they bought it.
If we said there were rare red bats in our tent, there absolutely were.
In a way, that's flattering and kind of sad that we used that blind trust to trick them, huh?