If you think it's too early to get ready for Halloween, you have probably not tried building a porch illusion to fool and bedazzle the trick or treaters on Halloween. A good illusion can take three or four months to build and test.

Professor Spellbinder describes some plans for porch illusions he and I have built and used in past years in this month's issue of The Wizards' Journal (#4) on his site. But you don't have to use any of his idea starters unless you want to. There are plenty of ideas in old illusion books.

The best part about building a Halloween porch illusion is that after Halloween is over, you can still use the illusion in your stage shows.

Some of you may have already done something similar in the past. Maybe you could share with us what illusions you built for your porch display and how well it worked out for you.

Hi Jim :)

I'm afraid 95% of Singaporeans here do not really celebrate Halloween the traditional way, where kids dress up and go door-to-door for candy. At most, adults just dress up for the heck of it at Halloween parties at clubs.

Still, I do agree that Halloween would be an excellent time to do some magic... But I guess if I was living in America, besides dressing up my porch for the festive mood, I'd probably do an "The House" IT string up so one can easily do some impromptu levitation at the drop of a hat :)

You may get screams from the kids tho ;)