In small town America, Halloween celebrations are next level. Here’s where you can take part in coffin races, Day of the Dead parades, and other morbidly quirky festivities.
Every October in tiny towns across the U.S., the spirit of Halloween gets turned up big time. Many communities proudly come together to transform their quaint main streets into a semblance of Jack Skellington’s haunted village in Nightmare Before Christmas. Bats and cobwebs dangle from awnings, grinning Jack-o’-lanterns sit on neighborhood porches, and costumed parades take over the streets.
Since the late 1800s, Americans have celebrated Halloween, which grew out of the Irish immigrant traditions of Samhain and All Saints’ Day, on October 31st. In the 1920s and 1930s, towns began encouraging structured activities, such as trick-or-treating, to deter mischievous teens from engaging in pranks and vandalism. Today, in many small US towns, Halloween has snowballed into a weeks-long schedule of festivities that draws in thousands of visitors.
Some destinations celebrate gruesome stories and historic events associated with their name, such as Sleepy Hollow’s Headless Horseman and Salem’s witch trials. Towns like Tombstone, Arizona, bring local flavor to Halloween traditions through Wild West ghost tours. Others show their passion for the holiday by racing coffins down a mountain or building a tower out of tens of thousands of pumpkins. Creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky, these little American towns do All Hallows’ Eve right.
