This post may contain affiliate links. If you choose to make a purchase after clicking a link, we may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
What better way to celebrate Halloween than to spend it surrounded by the haunting imagery and macabre tales of Edgar Allan Poe! If you’re a book lover, a fan of horror, or just looking for a spookier Halloween theme, this Edgar Allan Poe party is perfect for you! Read on to check out our ideas on decorations, food, and activities!
DECORATIONS
Luckily if you’re throwing your Edgar Allan Poe party during Halloween, there are tons of black bird decorations everywhere! (Now, some of these might actually be crows, but we won’t tell and your guests might not notice either :)) All things skeletons and dark Halloween decor also fit quite nicely into the theme as well!
We picked up some Raven & Skull Decorations, crows, and mini skull heads which we scattered across the party area. And to complete the room setting, we picked up a few Dollar Store black plastic table covers, crumpled them up a bit, and covered the walls with them.
If you have any Edgar Allan Poe books, now would be the time to put them on full display! Even if they aren’t in the best condition, it will still add a nice touch to the party area. We also printed out some poems & first pages of the short stories. We glued them to some black construction paper and laid those out around the tables and walls in the party area (more on that later 😉 )
TABLE
For our table, we picked up some Halloween Skull Plates and Halloween Raven Napkins from the Dollar Tree. We added a few black square plates, paper cobwebs, and some black feathers/pieces of feather around the table. Each table setting also got a black feather with a small glass jar to look like a quill & ink.
Our centerpiece had a dual function – if you’ve read any of our other parties, you’ll know we like to make things decorative and functional – this party is no exception! While we did have some raven decorations at the center (Raven on Branch Decoration and Raven in Birdcage), the fun part was underneath. What looked like a black construction paper table runner was actually a set of Edgar Allan Poe trivia – each guest could take a turn reading a card to the group 🙂
FOOD
No party is complete without some party food! Now, there isn’t much food mentioned in the poems and short stories by our celebrated author of the day, BUT we did come up with some clever nods to some of the stories.
Rather than just lay the food out, we added a quote from the story/poem on our food card as well as the title & year. It was a nice nod to the inspiration for the dish/dessert 😉
- The Bells: We went with Cream Cheese Stuffed Baby Bell Peppers but you could also use anything with portabella mushrooms or other bell pepper recipes.
- The Cask of Amontillado: If you have an age appropriate crowd, you could try & find a wine from Amontillado or try a dish made with Amontillado sherry. Otherwise, you could just reference the wine & cheese pairing and just lay out the cheese.
- Poe: Rename “Po” to “Poe” and you can set up some “Poe Boy Sandwiches”
- The Raven: One of Poe’s most famous poems hardly needs any introduction. Serve up some chicken wings but reference a raven on the food card 😉
- The Fall of the House of Usher: Okay, so technically, the sister in the story is named Madeline but Madeleine (as in madeleine cookies) are close enough!
- A Dream within a Dream: The poem references holding sand in your hand, so we laid out some mini sand dollar cookies. If you’re not into sugar & cinnamon cookies, you could also serve some Sand Pudding cups or some other summer-sand beach snack.
- A Tell Tale Heart: Bring out the Valentines Day baking supplies! We had some red mini heart cupcake liners and filled them up with some red velvet!
Mix in some other Halloween or Party food staples and you’ve got an amazing spread!
ACTIVITIES
As with most of our parties, we like to have a few printouts and crafts at an activity table just as an added activity for anyone who shows up early or stays a bit later.
Luckily for us, we found a few printables online. Check out this page from wordmint.com: Edgar Allan Poe Word Search. There are a few crossword puzzles below as well! Click, print, and you’re done! 🙂
For our craft, we found a Skull & Crow Wood Craft. Sooooo, while this wooden bird is technically a crow, no one seemed to mind 🙂 We picked up a few of these Laser Cut Wood Skull & Crow Signs, laid out some paint pens & markers, and let everyone get creative! Oddly enough, we ended up with some birds in colors other than black and gray 😉
Our main activity was our Treasure Hunt! We, of course, wanted to celebrate Edgar Allan Poe & so created our Treasure Hunt based upon his work! And this is where the printouts of the poems and stories come in! Although they looked quite nice scattered about the party area, they were actually part of the treasure hunt 😉 We hid the treasure hunt clues between the printout and the black construction paper. Each clue pointed to a piece of his work. It was super fun for the kids. We kept it fairly obvious so they didn’t have to know each poem/short story in detail but were of course on hand to give them added hints. Click here to check out full details, clues, and images!
And last but not least, we all gathered around the television to watch Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party by Shipwrecked. It’s fun & very well done – though it is Edgar Allan Poe & (as the name suggests) there is some murder involved. It’s nothing as gruesome as some of his stories but you may want to preview if you have a younger crowd coming over.
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you so much for checking out our party planning article. Hopefully it gave you some great ideas for your next celebration!
If you did enjoy this, please let us know below or follow us on Pinterest. Also, If you haven’t already and are still looking for that perfect party theme, feel free to check out some of our other Party Guides, Ideas for Booklovers, or Halloween Ideas!
Happy Party Planning 🙂
