Patents That Will Help You Haunt This Halloween!

On Halloween, great ideas come in all shapes and sizes. Pint-sized kids walk the neighborhoods in costumes that range from scary to funny to heroic. Candy fills treat bags and buckets shaped like monsters, ghosts and pumpkins. Front yards are full of Styrofoam graveyards, strobe lights, fog machines and life-sized skeletons rising from animated coffins. Behind many of these great and spooky ideas, there is a patent.

You may think that patents are the least-fun part of the year's most terrifying holiday, but Halloween-themed patents can actually make for entertaining reading. We picked out some of our favorites below.

"Haunting Aid"

"A face with glowing eyes returns stare or blinks at onlookers."

This patent, filed on October 11, 2002, protects a simple invention: Halloween props fitted with LED lights, which "may include complete (if often somewhat decayed or devoured) figures with glowing eyes. The LED's may burn steadily, staring unnervingly at onlookers. Alternately, they may blink or wink with cunning." These "haunting aids" promise to solve the problem of overpriced Halloween decor. "Unfortunately, one needs to be a grave robber in order to afford the lit-up props available today," the description says. Fortunately, "the main cost [of the haunting aid] to consumers comes in terms of lost sleep." Do not think the idea needs to be pigeonholed into spooky characters alone, though — the abstract is quick to note that the technology can also be used for "less sinister purposes."

"The invention may even be useful in producing mass-hysteria," it adds. You know, just in case you need a little mass-hysteria in your holiday. And, do not worry, "The heads need not be dismembered."

Fig. 1: Drawing of the "Haunting Aid" invention, patented on August 17, 2004. Fig. 2: Patented on February 1, 2011, the "Life size novelty item" is intended for entertainment during the Halloween season (source: USPTO Patent Full-Text Database).

"Life size Halloween novelty item"

Most patents — Halloween or otherwise — make for pretty dry reading, and the Haunting Aid is the exception rather than the rule. But some patents are so bizarre that they entertain without even meaning to, like this "life size Halloween novelty item."

Halloween is a time for scary costumes and decor, and some of those items can be gross, too. Who does not love to see decaying corpses walking the streets with their bowels hanging out of crude abdominal incisions? Besides everyone under the age...