Printable maze · Holidays
Halloween maze
A maze carved into the shape of a pumpkin, at three sizes. Exactly one route runs from start to finish, so there is always an answer and never a shortcut.
Print the page above, or take the easy grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
Print the page above, or take the medium grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
Print the page above, or take the hard grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
About Halloween
Halloween traces back to Samhain, a Gaelic festival marking the end of harvest and the start of winter, later folded into the Christian eve of All Saints' Day. Carved lanterns came from Ireland and Scotland, where people hollowed out turnips and beets and set embers inside them. Irish immigrants in North America found pumpkins larger, softer, and easier to cut, and the pumpkin jack-o'-lantern took over. Pumpkins are native to the Americas and belong to the squash family, grown for centuries before Europeans arrived.
Why a pumpkin
The silhouette is a pumpkin: a round, slightly squat body with vertical ribs and a short stem on top, and the paths wind through it while everything outside the outline stays solid wall. The ribbing gives the corridors a natural grain to follow, and the stem makes an obvious place to begin or end this halloween maze.
Teachers and parents print this in the last week of October, when classroom work turns seasonal and a quiet table activity is needed.
What is in this maze
A 10 by 10 maze cut into the shape of a pumpkin, with a single route of 55 steps and 35 turns from start to finish.
| Size | Grid | Shortest route | Turns |
|---|---|---|---|
| easy | 10 x 10 | 55 steps | 35 |
| medium | 16 x 16 | 116 steps | 75 |
| hard | 24 x 24 | 224 steps | 135 |
How to solve a Halloween maze
Every maze here is perfect, which is a precise thing rather than a compliment: there are no loops and no islands, so exactly one route joins any two points. That has a useful consequence. Keep one hand on the wall and never take it off, and you will walk the whole maze and arrive at the exit. It always works on a perfect maze. It is also slow, because it walks you into every dead end on the way.
Filling dead ends is faster. Find any square with walls on three sides, shade it in, and treat it as solid. That usually creates a new dead end next to it, so keep going. When you run out, what is left unshaded is the route. On the easy grid that is a few minutes of work; on the hard one it is the whole puzzle, and it is how most people who solve mazes quickly actually do it.
Working backwards is the third trick, and it exploits how a maze is built. Passages branch far more often near the start than near the finish, so tracing from the exit means fewer wrong turns to reject. On a shaped maze the outline helps too: the pumpkin silhouette is solid wall, so a corridor running along the edge of the shape has nowhere to branch and can be followed at speed.