3 spooky Home Assistant projects to try this weekend (Oct 30-Nov 1)

Published Oct 30, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. It's that time of year again when you have to give free candy away or face the consequences. My kids love Halloween, and it's one of the rare times when they are actively encouraging me to do smart home projects, as long as they're spooky. Here are three projects to try this weekend, if you dare. Make your video doorbell scare trick-or-treaters Use person detection to trigger spooky spoken audio I first tried this idea a couple of years ago, and my kids really loved it. We always go out trick-or-treating on Halloween night, so we have to leave the candy unattended outside our house. In the past, kids (who definitely won't be on Santa's nice list) have helped themselves to far more than their fair share. I decided to set up my video doorbell to spook people who come to the door and make them feel like they're being watched, which should hopefully discourage them from taking the whole bowl of candy for themselves. Even if it doesn't, it's great fun making trick-or-treaters jump by playing audio through the video doorbell when a person is detected. My Reolink doorbell has a voice message option that lets you record a spoken announcement that can play when someone rings the bell. Using Home Assistant, I was able to create an automation that could randomly play one of several spooky voice recordings whenever a person was detected at the front door on Halloween. An exterior Hue motion-activated light also comes on in spooky colors at the same time. In previous years we've recorded the voices ourselves, but this year I decided to use voices generated by a text-to-speech (TTS) model to make them sound even spookier. It's a great way to scare visitors and hopefully make them think twice about taking too much. Turn your smart lights into a haunted house A single script can give your lights four different spooky effects Smart bulbs often come with preset effects that can make the lights play different animations, such as mimicking a flickering fire. These effects aren't usually that spooky, however. One Home Assistant user decided to solve this by creating a script that you can use with any smart bulbs that support RGB commands. As long as your bulb allows you to send a light.turn_on action with rgb_color and brightness, you should be able to use the script to make your own lights perform the same effects. There are four different lighting effects. Hell mimics flickering red and orange flames, Lightning gives dramatic white flashes with darkness, Graveyard makes a dim green-blue glow, and Halloween transitions between classic orange, purple, and green Halloween colors. There's also a Stop effect that resets your lights. You can use the script to change the timing, colors, and brightness yourself. Once set up, you can call the script with the lights you want to use and the effect of choice, and watch the magic happen. If you have smart bulbs, this is a quick and easy way to make them spooky without having to create the lighting animations yourself. There are also Christmas and New Year scripts available. Build an animated talking skeleton using an ESP board Moving heads, spooky sound effects, and color-changing eyes Credit: Resinchem Tech If you're looking for a project to get your teeth into, this one is a lot more involved, but can look seriously impressive. Once it's built, you can keep on pulling it out for years to come. It's an animatronic Halloween skeleton, complete with a skull that can turn, play pre-recorded sounds, and has eyes that can light up in different colors. The whole thing is controlled by an ESP8266 development board connected to a servo to rotate the head. RGB LEDs give the spooky eyes, and a tiny MP3 player hooked up to a small speaker is responsible for the sounds. The skull is made from a Styrofoam mannequin head with a skull mask on the front. When a motion sensor detects someone approaching, the servo rotates the skull, the eyes light up, and the speaker plays the pre-recorded sounds. The eyes can also blink at random intervals even if no motion is detected. The ESP8266 can communicate with Home Assistant via MQTT, so you can trigger the skeleton's actions from your own automations. If it sounds like a complicated build, the creator has shared the custom firmware, and there's a full parts list and instructions on how to build your animated skeleton on their blog. You can follow the instructions to the letter or adapt the build to make it your own. The end results can be truly impressive. Smart home projects that come once a year I have plenty of automations that run every single day, but some of my favorite automations are ones that only get used once a year. The beauty is that once you've set them up, they're ready to turn back on every time that Halloween rolls around.