If you’ve been to a Lowe’s or one of those Spirit Halloween stores lately (and I know you have, because they’re every 500 feet or so), you’ve experienced the new generation of outrageous automated Halloween decorations—and their several-hundred-dollar price tags. Now that’s terrifying!
If you don’t have room in your house (or budget) for a wolf skeleton, a maniacal cymbal-clanging monkey, or the dog-like ghoul from Ghostbusters (my favorite), you can still create fun and kid-safe Halloween frights using a few common and inexpensive smart-home devices.
For most of these scenarios, you’ll need an Amazon Echo smart speaker (any one of them will do) and a nearby power outlet. We’ve listed some of our product picks that also work if you don’t own a similar device already. Most of these take just a few minutes to set up and require using the Alexa app to link your smart devices together and to create a Routine that tells your smart devices to act a certain way when they are triggered.
