The plant world is home to many weird or downright spooky houseplants. Growing scary houseplants is fun year-round, but for one special night of the year, they become spooky Halloween houseplants. Take a look at these haunted houseplants. Most are relatively easy to grow and all are fun houseplants for Halloween. 

Growing Spooky Houseplants

Here are some of my all-time favorite scary houseplants for Halloween:

• Earth star bromeliad (Cryptanthus): A rather odd-looking houseplant with interesting foliage in shades of pink or bright red to dark green or variegated with silvery stripes. Earth star bromeliad grows naturally in shady forests. It likes a fair amount of moisture and will do well in a bathroom or kitchen. 

• Desert Dragon Mangave (Mangave ‘Desert Dragon’): A low-growing succulent with a spidery shape and grayish green, lance-shaped leaves mottled with dark purple spots. Desert dragon mangave is easy to grow in bright sunlight. It prefers regular moisture but will rebound if you forget to water once in a while.

• Bat flower (Tacca integrifolia or Tacca chantrieri): Possibly the most sinister looking of all the Halloween houseplants. This oddity of the plant kingdom has large green leaves and dark purple blooms. The bat flower is weird but pretty, reminiscent of a bat with large whiskers.

• Grub fern (Polypodium formosanum): Shows off pretty, ferny foliage but it’s the rhizomes that make grub fern one of the most scary houseplants. The rhizomes, or runners, are pale green, scaly, wormlike growths that pop up beneath the foliage and may actually extend, fingerlike, over the sides of the pot. Grub fern is also known as caterpillar fern or blue feet fern.

• Deadbone (Euphorbia platyclada): Also known as skeletal bones, dead plant, dead stick plant, or dead wood plant, deadbone is a leafless plant with weird, dead-looking, flat stems splattered and splotched with shades of reddish-brown and bright pink. Like all euphorbias, deadbone excretes a milky-white latex that may cause an irritating, painful rash if it comes in contact with your skin

• Cocoon plant (Senecio haworthii): Also known as wooly scenecio, it is a compact plant with intense, silvery white, cocoon-like leaves. This plant, native to Africa, is one of the easiest Halloween houseplants to grow and can be propagated by sticking a stem in a pot of sandy soil. 

• White velvet (Tradescantia sillamontana): A resilient, easy-to-grow plant with gray green leaves wrapped with silvery, cobweb-like hairs. Bright purplish pink flowers may appear in summer. White velvet is also known as cobweb spiderwort, gossamer plant, or kitten ears.