Halloween word search, spooky but friendly

Rules

• Somewhere in the grid, in a straight line, is each Halloween word from the list.
• Easy puzzles keep to reading order: a word runs rightwards or downwards.
• Hard puzzles hide words in all directions, slanting and reversed as well.
• Words may run through each other, sharing a letter. None is hidden more than once.
• Tap a word's first letter and its last letter to catch it.

Who is hiding in the Halloween grid

Most of the Halloween list is a cast of characters: ghost, witch, wizard, vampire, zombie, mummy, skeleton, goblin, werewolf and a general monster. Around them are their belongings and their animals: a broom, a cauldron, a potion, a spell, bats, a spider in its cobweb and a raven. The setting is a haunted graveyard with a tombstone at midnight under the moon, described with spooky, creepy, eerie, shadow, scream and fright. The friendly end of the evening is there too: pumpkin, lantern, costume, mask, candy, treats and the trick that goes with them. There is no blood and nothing violent in the list.

For a class party, hand out the easy grid while costumes are being judged or while one group is at the apple-bobbing. Because every sheet has a number, you can print the same one for the whole class and show the solution page on the board, or print a run of different numbers so that neighbours cannot copy. For a darker room, the large print switch makes the letters easier to read by lantern light.

At home, the hard grid is a good companion to the bowl by the door on the thirty-first: something to pick up between rings of the bell. The words in it hide backwards as often as forwards, so read each row from right to left once. Skeleton, graveyard, tombstone and halloween itself are the long ones to find first.

Tips

• Zombie and wizard each have a Z, and vampire the only V. Those three are usually the fastest finds.
• The double O of broom, spooky and moon and the double E of creepy, eerie and halloween stand out in a row of letters.
• Skull and skeleton both begin with SK; so does nothing else in the list.
• A new grid comes up on each day of October, with a different handful of monsters in it.
• Copy link sends the exact numbered puzzle to a friend, so you can race each other on the same grid.

How these puzzles are made and checked

A separate scan reads the finished grid from every cell in all eight directions. Every listed word must be found exactly once, at the stored position, and the grid must not spell a word from our deny list outside the listed words.

The puzzle of the day is chosen by the date on your device: puzzle 1 was the puzzle for 1 January 2026, and the number goes up by one each day. Easy: 366 puzzles, so the same puzzle comes round again after 366 days. Hard: 366 puzzles, so the same puzzle comes round again after 366 days. Every number stays open in the archive control above the grid. More detail is on the page how the puzzles are made and checked.