CraftdotYou've Been BOOed: Free Printable Kit With the Instructions on the Sign
A free printable You've Been BOOed kit: the doorstep sign with the steps printed on it, the window ghost, and four bag toppers. Letter and A4, no signup.
No email or signup. Printing instructions are below.
On this page
This is the whole kit for booing a neighbour: the sign you leave on the doorstep, the ghost they tape in their window afterwards, and four toppers for the treat bags. The instructions are printed on the sign itself, so the person who finds it on their step knows what to do without going anywhere near a website.
Download: You've Been BOOed printable kit, free PDF, Letter + A4. No signup, no email.
How booing works, if it has not reached your street yet
Somebody leaves a bag of treats on your doorstep with a sign, rings the bell, and disappears before you open the door. You keep the treats. You put the ghost sign in your front window so everyone knows your house has had its turn. Then you make up two bags of your own and do the same to two houses that have no ghost in the window yet.
That is the whole game. It runs through the first three weeks of October and it dies out on its own by Halloween, once most of the street has a ghost up.
Why the instructions are on the sign
Nearly every boo kit puts the poem on the sign and the instructions on a web page. That works fine for the person printing it. It does not work for the person who finds a paper bag on their step at nine at night, because they are holding a sign and they have no idea what any of it means.
So the doorstep sign here carries five short lines telling them exactly what happened and what to do next. It costs a bit of the drama. It is also what decides whether they join in or just eat the treats and go to bed.
What is in the file
Six pages. Pages 1 to 3 are US Letter, pages 4 to 6 are the same three on A4, so you only print the set that matches your paper.
- Page 1, the doorstep sign. A jack-o'-lantern, "A treat landed on your doorstep. You've been BOOed!", and the five numbered steps underneath.
- Page 2, the window ghost. A drawn ghost above "We've been BOOed!" in letters you can read from the pavement. No small print, because nobody stands on your lawn reading small print.
- Page 3, four treat bag toppers. Fold-over strips for the tops of the two bags you are about to give away, with two spare. They are 75mm wide, which is about 3 inches, and each one has that measurement printed on its own face so you can hold it against your bags before you cut anything.
Plain paper is fine for all three. Card is nicer for the window ghost if you have it, since that one has to survive three weeks of being taped to glass.
Print and cut
Print at 100%, or "actual size" if your printer calls it that. Do not tick "fit to page", which shrinks everything by a few percent and makes the bag toppers slightly too narrow for the bags they were measured for.
The two signs need no cutting at all. For the toppers, cut along the dashed outlines, fold across the middle where it says fold, and lay the fold over the mouth of the filled bag. Two staples through both layers holds it. The little marks at the bottom show you roughly where they go.
The night you boo
Go after dark, because half the fun for whoever is with you is the running away. Ring the bell or knock, then get off the step. You do not have to hide in a hedge. Walking briskly back to the car is enough.
If you would rather not ring at all, that is fine too. Leave the bag where it will not be stepped on and text them "look outside". The sign does the explaining either way, which is the point of putting the words on it.
Why the window ghost matters more than it looks
The ghost is the bit that stops the whole thing collapsing. Without it, three different families boo the same friendly house on the same street and nobody boos the quiet one at the end. With it, you can walk the street and see at a glance which doors are still waiting.
Tape it up facing out, at about eye height, in a window that faces the road. Leave it there until Halloween.
A version for people without a street
Booing works in an office, a classroom or a block of flats, with one change: leave the bag somewhere it will be found by the right person and not opened by six others. A desk, a locker, a doormat inside the building.
In a flat block, check first that leaving things in the corridor is allowed, because in some buildings it is not and a paper bag of treats is exactly the sort of thing that gets swept up.
If you want more toppers
The four here all say boo-related things. If you are filling more bags than that, our Halloween treat bag toppers sheet has eight more in two sizes, and they print at the same measured widths.
If you are booing a house with a very small child in it, something that isn't sweets goes down well. Our Halloween colouring pages for toddlers print flat and slide in beside everything else, and there is nothing frightening on any page.
For the same doorstep game at Christmas, the You've Been Jingled kit includes signs for home and work.
Common questions
What do you put in a You've Been BOOed bag?
Sweets, small chocolate bars, a bag of popcorn, a pencil, a bath bomb, anything you would happily receive yourself. There is no rule about spending. The bag matters less than the sign, because the sign is what keeps it moving down the street.
How does You've Been BOOed actually work?
Somebody leaves treats on your doorstep with a sign, rings the bell and disappears. You keep the treats, tape the ghost page in your front window so the street knows your house has had its turn, then make up two bags and boo two houses with no ghost showing yet.
What size are the treat bag toppers?
Seventy-five millimetres wide, which is about three inches, and each topper has that measurement printed on its own face so you can hold it against your bags before cutting. Print at 100% rather than fit to page, or they come out slightly too narrow.
