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I think you handled things about as well as could be expected, taking into account that you were not armed at the time.

Until very recently, my wife and I entertained a lot. We discontinued, just this month, hosting a twice-monthly dinner for the single folks at our church which we had been hosting for two years. It was always held on the 2nd and 4th Fridays of the month. To put it in perspective, that's 48 dinner parties in 24 months. We have been asked a few times by a guest if they could invite a friend along. It's always been a girl, asking if she could invite a girlfriend, and the 3rd party has always been someone she knew from our church.....another single person. We always said yes, because the risks were low.....and we knew we would have enough to feed one extra mouth....plus it expanded the ministry we were doing.

However, our primary concern was always to make sure we had enough food prepared to feed everyone who showed up. So one of the things that we did early on was to set up an email list, and we sent out reminder emails on the Monday's before the dinner party, asking people to RSVP, so that we would know how many people to fix dinner for. It might be anywhere from 5 or 6, to as many as 12-15. We always prepared enough food to feed the number who RSVP'd, plus 1 or 2 more, because we knew that RVSP is a dying art, and either not everyone invited would respond, or they might change their mind and decide to come at the last minute.

One of the advantages of doing things that way is that if someone were to ask of 5 or 6 friends of theirs could come, we could easily (and truthfully) say we hadn't planned on that many people and won't have enough food to feed everyone.....so, not this time. It provides us with a gentle way of saying "no" without offending. In our particular case, the kind of people who were coming simply didn't associate with thugs, so that was not really an issue. But having done it for a couple of years taught us a lot about how to make life easier for the person(s) doing the planning and hosting. Two of those lessons learned are 1) the emailed invitations requesting RSVP, and 2) the "gee, no, sorry......we just don't have enough food for everyone."

I'm pretty sure you could apply those two tools to just about anything you host, including a halloween party.