A run of small white ghosts on a fine wire, each one lit from the inside by its own LED. Pick anything from ten to fifty of them, glowing warm white or different colors along the string, all running on AA batteries from a slim box you can tuck out of sight.
No socket. No extension lead down the hall. Nothing taped across the front step.
Everything worth decorating is nowhere near a socket
Think about where you actually want lights at the end of October. The banister, the mantel, the porch rail, the window that faces the street, the shelf by the front door. Most of those have no plug behind them, so the string either stays in the box or it gets run to the nearest outlet and the cable becomes the thing everybody looks at.
This one carries its own power. The battery box is small enough to tuck behind a banister post, slip under a garland or drop inside a pumpkin, and nothing runs back to the wall.
What a cheap ghost string gets wrong
The face, usually. Two dots and a thin line reads as a snowman from six feet away. These carry a wide filled black crescent for a mouth, turned up to a point at both corners, and the hem below is cut into two lobes so the tail hooks over to one side. It still looks like a ghost with the lights off, which matters, because a string of lights spends most of the day switched off.
Then there is the wire. It is clear and twisted fine enough to vanish against a painted banister in daylight, so what you see is the ghosts and not the cable between them.
Picking a string
Every string runs from the same flat clear battery box, with a slide switch on the end. The ten-ghost run is the one for a single window or a small shelf. Twenty covers a mantel, and the thirty, forty and fifty strings are for longer runs along a banister or around a window.
On light color, warm white settles quietly against wood and paint and multicolor is the party one.
Where they end up
Wound along a banister, laid across a mantel behind the candles, framed around a front window, or dropped into the bowl of sweets by the door so the whole bowl glows.
Put them up at the start of the month, leave them, and take them down in November.
Specifications
Lights: White molded plastic ghosts, one LED inside each
Face: Two black eyes and a wide filled black mouth, with a two-lobed hem below
Light color: Warm White, or Multicolor
Number of lights: 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 per string
Dimensions: 4.9 ft (1.5 m) long with 10 lights, 9.8 ft (3 m) long with 20 lights
Spacing: About 6 in (15 cm) between ghosts on the 10 and 20 light strings
Power: AA batteries in a slim clear box with a slide switch, batteries not included
Wire: Clear twisted wire
Shell: Opaque white
Material: Plastic
Use: Indoors, or somewhere sheltered. Keep the battery box out of direct rain
Package Includes
1x Ghost String Light
1x Battery Box with a Slide Switch