Free Vintage Halloween Printables & Ephemera
Overview
Find free vintage Halloween printables and collage sheets made from authentic historical artwork, including postcards, ephemera, illustrations, photographs, and other vintage sources.
Download Halloween images for junk journals, art journals, scrapbooks, mixed-media collage, handmade cards, tags, ATCs, paper crafts, and digital creative projects.
Explore vintage Halloween themes including witches, pumpkins, black cats, owls, Halloween greetings, Victorian costumes, ghosts, spirit photographs, and other unusual spooky imagery.
These printables feature artwork from historical sources that is in the public domain in the United States.
All of the collage sheets on The Art Scavenger are free to download. No membership or email signup is required.
Free Vintage Halloween Printables for Creative Projects
Halloween has produced some wonderfully strange and entertaining artwork over the years, and I love finding ways to give those old images a new life.
Here you'll find my collection of free vintage Halloween printables, collage sheets, and ephemera for junk journals, art journals, scrapbooks, mixed-media projects, handmade cards, paper crafts, digital collage, and more.
I've gathered Halloween imagery from authentic vintage postcards, books, photographs, catalogs, and other historical sources and turned the images into printable sheets that you can download and use in your own creative projects.
Some are colorful and playful. Others are a little darker and stranger. You'll find witches, pumpkins, black cats, owls, ghosts, Victorian costumes, Halloween greetings, vintage photographs, and plenty of unusual old illustrations.
Scroll down to explore the Halloween printables and find something for your next project.
Vintage Halloween Postcards
Spirit Photos
Animal Skeletons
Halloween Ephemera
Magic Props
Owl Illustrations
Explore the Halloween Printables
Vintage Halloween Postcards
Vintage Halloween postcards are some of my favorite sources for Halloween collage material.
Early 20th-century Halloween postcards often featured witches, jack-o'-lanterns, black cats, children in costumes, owls, moons, Halloween greetings, and playful scenes that look very different from much of today's Halloween artwork.
I've created several printable collections from these historical postcards, with different combinations of images and sizes.
Free Vintage Halloween Postcard Image Printables for Junk Journals, Collage & Crafts
Start with:
Free Vintage Halloween Postcard Image Printables for Junk Journals, Collage & Crafts
This collection includes two printable sheets featuring Halloween greetings, pumpkins, witches, black cats, children in costume, fortune-telling scenes, and other early-20th-century postcard imagery.
The images work particularly well as journal cards, collage elements, scrapbook embellishments, handmade cards, ATCs, and digital collage pieces.
Also explore:
Free Vintage Halloween Postcards Printable: Junk Journal & Craft Ephemera
This collection features early-1900s Halloween postcard artwork with pumpkins, witches, owls, and other spooky seasonal imagery.
Free Printable Halloween Postcard Images + How to Use Them in Your Crafting
An earlier collection of vintage Halloween postcard images with ideas for incorporating them into your creative projects.
Old-Fashioned Halloween Magic: Free Vintage Postcard Collage Sheets to Print and Create With
This collection features restored artwork from authentic early-1900s postcards, including witches, cats, children, Halloween scenes, journal cards, and gift tags.
Halloween Ephemera, Tags & Journal Cards
If you're making a Halloween junk journal, smaller pieces of ephemera can be just as useful as full-size images.
Vintage Halloween tags and journal cards can be tucked into pockets, layered onto journal pages, used as writing spaces, or cut apart to create smaller collage elements.
Halloween Journal Cards
Halloween Gift Tags
Free Vintage Halloween Ephemera: Printable Journal Tags and Cards
This collection includes vintage Halloween postcard artwork arranged as journal tags and cards. The images include witches, pumpkins, owls, masks, and festive vintage verses.
You can use the larger pieces as focal points or cut individual elements apart to create your own layered collages.
Halloween Ephemera Vintage Printables
This collection features vintage Halloween postcard images with witches, pumpkins, and eerie nighttime scenes. It also includes both smaller journal-card-sized images and ATC-sized pieces.
Free Printable Halloween Ephemera + 31 Spooky Journal Prompts
If you're looking for more than just images, this collection combines Halloween ephemera with journal prompts, making it especially useful for creating a themed art journal or junk journal.
Black Cats, Owls & Other Halloween Animals
Animals have always been a big part of Halloween imagery, and they’re especially useful for collage because individual illustrations can be cut out and used in so many different ways. Black cats, bats, owls, birds, and other creatures can work on their own or as part of a larger Halloween-themed page.
Black Cat Ephemera Printable
Owl Portraits from the 1870s
Black Cat Ephemera Printables are a natural starting point for classic Halloween imagery, with vintage cat illustrations that can be used for junk journals, Halloween cards, tags, collage, and other paper crafts.
If you like the idea of animals with a little more personality, take a look at my Cats in Costume printables. These vintage cat illustrations feature cats dressed up in human clothing and make particularly fun additions to Halloween junk journals, whimsical collage projects, and handmade cards.
My Owl Portrait Printables are another good choice for a darker Halloween page. The formal vintage owl portraits have an entirely different look from the more familiar cartoon-style Halloween imagery.
And don't forget the bats. My Bat Illustrations page features vintage bat artwork that can be used for Halloween collage sheets, journal pages, cards, tags, and other spooky paper projects.
Ghosts, Spirits & Victorian Photography
If pumpkins and witches aren't quite your style, vintage ghost photography offers a completely different direction.
Victorian spirit photography printable Halloween ephemera
Free Spirit Photo Printables: Vintage Victorian Ghost Ephemera for Journals & Halloween features historical spirit photographs that can be used in Halloween junk journals, gothic collage, altered books, art journals, and other projects.
Spirit photography is particularly interesting because it connects Halloween crafting with the history of photography and Victorian fascination with the supernatural.
These aren't modern Halloween graphics designed to look old. They're historical photographs with their own stories and visual character.
That makes them especially useful when you're creating a Halloween project with a darker, stranger, or more historical feel.
Vintage Halloween Catalogs, Labels & Ephemera
Not all Halloween imagery comes from postcards or illustrations created specifically for Halloween. Some of my favorite material for Halloween projects comes from old catalogs, labels, advertisements, and other pieces of commercial ephemera.
These sources are particularly useful when you want to create a Halloween journal page that feels a little different from the usual pumpkins and black cats.
Vintage Victorian costume illustrations for Halloween collage and junk journals
Poison Bottle Labels
My Free Victorian Costume Printables feature vintage costume illustrations that can be used for Halloween junk journals, altered books, collage, handmade cards, and other projects. The clothing and figures also work well for historical or theatrical-themed pages.
For something a little more mysterious, my Vintage Poison Bottle Labels collection features old-fashioned poison labels that are perfect for Halloween apothecary themes, potion bottles, witchy journal pages, and spooky mixed-media collage.
You can also browse my Vintage Magic Props Catalog Sheets, which come from an old catalog featuring magic and illusion-related products. The unusual advertisements and illustrations make great additions to Halloween journals, especially if you like vintage sideshow, magician, fortune-telling, or oddities-inspired imagery.
My Free Printable Vintage Apothecary Labels are another useful source for creating potion bottles, medicine cabinets, apothecary shops, and other Halloween-inspired scenes. Even though these labels weren't necessarily created as Halloween decorations, their old pharmaceutical designs fit naturally into Halloween craft projects.
Together, these pages give you a different kind of Halloween ephemera to work with: costumes, poison labels, magic catalogs, and apothecary graphics that can be mixed with postcards, animals, ghosts, and other vintage Halloween imagery.
Gothic & Dark Halloween Inspiration
Some vintage images aren't specifically Halloween-themed but work beautifully in darker seasonal projects.
Vintage snake illustrations for Gothic and Dark Academia Journals
Anatomy illustrations from a vintage encyclopedia
Free Vintage Snake Ephemera: Printable Illustrations for Gothic and Dark Academia Journals is a good example.
Vintage scientific and natural-history illustrations can give a Halloween journal a completely different direction. Snakes, poisonous plants, mushrooms, insects, old scientific diagrams, anatomical illustrations, and other unusual subjects can all work as supporting imagery.
You don't necessarily need an image that says "Happy Halloween" to make a Halloween collage.
Sometimes a strange botanical illustration, an old scientific engraving, or a Victorian photograph creates a much more interesting page.
How to Use Vintage Halloween Printables
The nice thing about printable ephemera is that you don't have to use it exactly as it comes off the printer.
Cut it apart. Layer it. Tear it. Write on it. Combine it with other images. Use only one small piece of a larger illustration.
Here are some ideas to get you started.
Halloween Junk Journals
Use vintage Halloween images as:
Journal cards
Tuck-ins
Pockets
Tags
Page focal points
Collage layers
Writing prompts
Decorative borders
Envelope inserts
Tip-ins
Try combining a vintage postcard with torn book pages, handwritten journaling, fabric scraps, lace, stamps, or other ephemera.
Art Journals
Halloween is a great excuse to experiment with a more dramatic art-journal spread.
Use a vintage image as your starting point and build around it with paint, ink, stamps, handwriting, texture, or additional collage pieces.
You can also cut a single illustration into pieces and use those fragments throughout a two-page spread.
Example of an art journal page made using free Halloween ephemera
Scrapbooking
Vintage Halloween postcards make excellent scrapbook focal points.
Use a larger image alongside photographs, seasonal memories, handwritten captions, or smaller pieces of ephemera.
You can also cut out individual pumpkins, cats, witches, or other figures and use them as embellishments.
Handmade Halloween Cards
Many vintage postcards already have a composition that works beautifully as a card front.
Print an image on cardstock, trim it to size, and attach it to a blank card. You can add a handwritten message, ribbon, a small tag, or another piece of vintage ephemera.
ATCs and Small Collage Projects
Smaller Halloween images are particularly useful for Artist Trading Cards and other miniature projects.
Look for the collections that include 2.5 x 3.5-inch ATC-sized images or smaller journal cards.
Mixed-Media Collage
Don't feel like you have to preserve the original image.
Cut out the parts you like and combine them with paint, vintage papers, book pages, handwriting, fabric, stamps, botanical illustrations, or other collage materials.
A black cat from one sheet might work perfectly with a moon from another and a Victorian figure from a completely different collection.
Digital Collage & Digital Scrapbooking
You can also use the imagery from these printable collections in digital creative projects, provided you follow the usage terms for the individual collection.
Vintage Halloween images can be incorporated into digital scrapbook pages, original digital collages, journal pages, graphics, printable artwork, and other creative compositions.
What Makes Vintage Halloween Images So Interesting?
Modern Halloween imagery tends to repeat a familiar group of symbols: pumpkins, witches, ghosts, bats, black cats, skeletons, and haunted houses.
Vintage Halloween artwork gives you many of those same subjects, but in a very different visual language.
Early postcard artists often combined elaborate lettering, unusual colors, decorative borders, humorous characters, theatrical scenes, and exaggerated expressions.
Children might appear alongside enormous pumpkins. Witches might be portrayed as playful rather than frightening. Black cats could be mischievous characters rather than sinister ones.
And because these images were originally created for postcards, advertisements, books, catalogs, or other printed materials, they already have the qualities that make good ephemera: borders, typography, small details, interesting compositions, and a sense of history.
That makes them especially useful for collage.
A Halloween collage featuring a vintage owl portrait
Are These Vintage Halloween Printables Public Domain?
The vintage artwork used in these collections comes from historical sources that, to the best of my knowledge, are in the public domain in the United States.
However, it's important to distinguish between the original historical artwork and the printable collage sheets I create.
I source, restore, arrange, and format the historical images into printable sheets for The Art Scavenger. The individual collage sheets themselves may not be sold or redistributed as-is, either digitally or in printed form.
You are welcome to use the printables in your own personal or commercial creative projects according to the terms provided.
If you're using the underlying artwork commercially, especially outside the United States, you should always do your own research into the copyright status and laws that apply to your particular use.
For complete details, please see the Terms of Use.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are these Halloween printables free?
Yes. The Halloween collage sheets on The Art Scavenger are free to download. There is no membership or email signup required.
Individual collections may include JPG and PDF download options, so you can choose the format that works best for your project.
Can I use the Halloween printables for commercial projects?
Yes. You may use the collage sheets in your own creative projects, including handmade projects that you sell, as long as you follow the usage terms.
You may not sell or redistribute the collage sheets themselves as-is in either printed or digital form.
Can I use these Halloween images in a junk journal?
Absolutely. That's one of the main reasons I make these collections.
Vintage Halloween images work especially well as journal cards, tags, pockets, tuck spots, focal points, collage pieces, and decorative elements.
What kind of paper should I use?
For most paper-crafting projects, I recommend smooth matte cardstock. It is sturdy enough for cutting, tags, journal cards, pockets, and collage work while still feeding through most home printers.
For projects where you want a thinner, more flexible piece of ephemera, regular printer paper can work too.
Can I use the images for digital collage?
Yes, where permitted by the usage terms. You can incorporate the imagery into your own original digital creative projects, but you may not redistribute or sell The Art Scavenger's printable sheets themselves as standalone files.
More Free Vintage Printables
Halloween is only one part of The Art Scavenger.
If you enjoy working with vintage images, you can also explore my collections of free printable ephemera, botanical illustrations, animals, Victorian imagery, apothecary labels, transportation, advertisements, postcards, and other historical artwork.
You can browse the full collection of Free Printable Collage & Ephemera Sheets or explore the individual categories to find more images for your next project.
Final Thoughts
I love Halloween, but I'm especially interested in the way Halloween was represented in older printed materials.
A vintage postcard can tell you something about the holiday, the people who celebrated it, the artists who illustrated it, and the visual styles that were popular at the time. Once those images are turned into printable ephemera, they become useful again in a completely different context.
Whether you're making a Halloween junk journal, a scrapbook page, a handmade card, a mixed-media collage, a gothic art journal, or a digital project, I hope you find something here that gives you an idea for what to make next.
Browse the collections, download what catches your eye, and start creating.
