The Halloween Travel Lists Forgot 7 Places (I Checked)

Every October, the same travel lists make the rounds: the best spooky Halloween destinations, ranked and rounded up. One of them named six — Salem, New Orleans, the Hudson Valley, Savannah, St. Augustine, and Edinburgh — and honestly, it’s a solid list. I know, because I just got back from one of them.

I was in Salem for the kickoff of Haunted Happenings in early October, in full chaos: the Grand Parade that opens the season, a late-night ghost tour, the House of the Seven Gables, a tarot reading, and a tour inside the Witch House. Salem in October is exactly as advertised — which is to say, elbow-to-elbow.

But here’s what stuck with me after reading that list with fresh Salem legs: it forgot seven places. One of them is the actual birthplace of Halloween. One of them is where Dracula was actually written. And one of them is thirty minutes from my house.

So here are all thirteen — the six they got right and the seven they forgot — with the real history, the fact you’ll repeat at dinner, what to actually go see, and the planning truth nobody puts in the listicles.

A note on timing: every place below is described the way it runs every year — the pattern, not one year’s calendar — and there’s a small “this year’s dates” box right after this intro for the current season. One evergreen truth: whenever Halloween lands on or near a weekend, every destination on this list gets more crowded and more expensive. And for most of these places, planning early isn’t a tip. It’s the whole game.

1. Anoka, Minnesota — the Halloween Capital of the World

The history. Anoka’s claim isn’t marketing. In 1920, the town’s teenagers were spending Halloween the old way: tipping over outhouses, soaping windows, and setting cows loose on Main Street. So the town’s civic leaders did something genius — they threw a party instead. That 1920 celebration, with more than a thousand schoolchildren parading in costume, is believed to be the first Halloween parade in the United States, and the celebration has run ever since. The only full pauses were a couple of war years — and even in 2020, its centennial year, Anoka refused to cancel: the parades went drive-by, with the floats stationed around town for people to tour by car, the kids’ parade and gala moved online, and the house-decorating contest carried on as usual. Full-scale, it was back the following year. In 1937 the town proclaimed itself the Halloween Capital of the World — a 12-year-old paperboy named Harold Blair even traveled to Washington, D.C. wearing a “Halloween Capital” sweater to deliver the proclamation. Today a volunteer nonprofit, Anoka Halloween Inc., runs 30+ events across October, and the proceeds support local schools and scholarships.

Did you know?

Anoka doesn’t have one parade. It has three — the Light Up the Night Parade, the Big Parade of Little People (for the kids), and the Grande Day Parade down Main Street. There’s also the Gray Ghost Run, named for a local marathoner in his 70s, Bill Andberg, whose gray-clad figure was so often spotted running through a local cemetery that locals nicknamed him the Gray Ghost.

Go see. The Grande Day Parade — 1.5 miles down Main Street, free, held the Saturday before Halloween, and opened by a military flyover — plus the Light Up the Night Parade earlier in October (Main Street’s lights go down so the lit floats glow, and it ends with a bonfire, a tradition stretching back to 1920). Beyond the parades, the month is stacked: the Ghosts of Anoka walking ghost tours through Halloween, a haunted house, the Gray Ghost 5K, a medallion hunt (you’ll need the Anoka Halloween Button for that one), costume contests, a pumpkin weigh-off and carving contests, a scarecrow contest, horror-movie nights, and a scavenger hunt. Two low-key favorites: the house-decorating contest — locals go all-in, and driving the displays after dark is an event in itself — and Monster Mash, when Main Street turns into a trick-or-treat zone. Early in the month, the Fall Festival at the Anoka County Fairgrounds adds hayrides, a free pumpkin patch, and a not-too-scary haunted house.

Around the area. Anoka is a Twin Cities trip, so the Halloween menu widens fast: pumpkin patches and corn mazes in the northern suburbs (Anoka County Farms in Ham Lake, Waldoch Farm in Lino Lakes), apple orchards, big regional haunted attractions like the Dead End Hayride in Wyoming, and the Minnesota Zoo’s Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular in Apple Valley — thousands of carved pumpkins on a woodland trail, and worth the drive on its own. The Anoka County Historical Society’s museum (in the old Carnegie library) is the rainy-day stop, and historic Main Street and the Rum River are the wander-in-between ones.

2. Transylvania, Romania — Dracula’s home turf

The history. Bran Castle was first documented in 1377, built by the Saxons of Brașov as a fortress guarding the mountain pass between Transylvania and Wallachia. Its most famous resident wasn’t a vampire at all — it was Queen Marie of Romania, who received the castle as a gift in 1920 and turned it into her summer residence. The interiors you’ll tour are mostly hers. About two hours away, Sighișoara is one of Europe’s best-preserved inhabited medieval citadels, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with nine surviving guild towers — and it’s where Vlad III, the real historical figure behind the Dracula legend, was born in 1431.

Did you know?

Neither half of the legend actually lived the story. Bram Stoker never visited Romania — he built Dracula’s castle entirely from library books, and the castle in his novel sits near a completely different mountain pass, hundreds of kilometers from Bran. And there’s no solid evidence Vlad the Impaler ever lived at Bran Castle either. Bran became “Dracula’s Castle” in the 20th century mostly because, honestly, it looks exactly like it should.

Go see. Bran Castle leans in every Halloween: themed tours in the days around it, and on Halloween night itself an evening castle tour followed by a party in a heated tent in the Royal Park that runs until 4 AM. Costumes expected. (The programme’s name and packages change year to year — check the castle’s site for the current edition.) Round out the trip with Brașov’s old town and Black Church (30 minutes from Bran) and a proper stay in Sighișoara: the Clock Tower, the citadel lanes, and the house identified as Vlad’s birthplace, now a restaurant.

3. Whitby, England — where Dracula actually landed

The history. Whitby Abbey was founded in AD 657, hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664 (the meeting that settled how England would calculate Easter), and its Gothic ruins — the ones on the cliff today — date to the 13th and 14th centuries. In August 1890, a theater manager named Bram Stoker arrived for a holiday, staying at a guesthouse at 6 Royal Crescent. In the town library he found a book noting that “Dracula,” in Wallachian, means “devil.” He walked the abbey ruins, read the gravestones in St. Mary’s churchyard (one name, Swales, became Dracula’s first Whitby victim in the novel), and wrote Whitby directly into the book: Dracula’s ship, the Demeter, wrecks here, and a huge black dog bounds ashore and up the 199 Steps.

Did you know?

The Demeter was a real Whitby wreck with its name barely disguised. In October 1885 — five years before Stoker’s visit — the Russian schooner Dmitry, from Narva, ran aground below the East Cliff in a storm, carrying silver sand. Stoker rearranged it into the Demeter, from Varna, carrying silver sand and boxes of earth. The town has been living in the novel ever since.

Go see. Whitby Goth Weekend — running since 1994, when founder Jo Hampshire invited about 40 pen pals to meet in a pub — takes over the town over Halloween weekend (it runs twice a year; the autumn edition is the Halloween one): hundreds of capes, the Bizarre Bazaar alternative market (100+ stalls, free entry), and ticketed gigs including the Tomorrow’s Ghosts Festival. Whitby Abbey is also illuminated on late-October evenings around Halloween, with timed evening tickets. Any time: climb the 199 Steps to St. Mary’s and the abbey, visit the Whitby Museum (ask about the Hand of Glory), walk the harbor, and eat fish and chips where fish and chips deserve to be eaten.

4. Derry, Northern Ireland — the one they really missed

The history. Derry’s festival has Samhain roots, but its modern origin story is gloriously specific. In 1985, a publican named Brian Doherty hosted a fancy-dress night at his bar on Magazine Street. A security alert during the Troubles emptied the bar mid-party — and around 50 costumed revelers spilled out onto Shipquay Street, to the visible amusement of the police clearing them. The sight was so good that the city made it official the following year. The stage helps: Derry is the only completely walled city left in Ireland, its 17th-century walls (built 1613–1619, about a mile around) still walkable end to end. The festival is billed by its organizers as Europe’s largest Halloween festival, drawing some 120,000 visitors — and it has previously been voted the world’s best Halloween destination in a USA Today readers’ poll.

Did you know?

One of the biggest Halloween festivals on earth started because a bomb scare emptied a pub. No committee, no tourism strategy — just fifty people in costume refusing to let the night end.

Go see. Derry Halloween runs for four big nights ending on Halloween (roughly October 28–31). The Awakening the Walled City Trail lights up the walls and gates with installations and performers on the nights leading up to Halloween. The Carnival Parade rolls on Halloween night itself, with hundreds of community performers and tens of thousands lining the route, followed by fireworks over the River Foyle. The headline events are free. By day, walk the walls, visit the Guildhall and the Tower Museum, see the Bogside murals and the Museum of Free Derry, and cross the Peace Bridge.

5. County Meath, Ireland — Halloween’s actual birthplace

The history. If Halloween has a birthplace, this is the strongest claim on earth. Samhain — sunset on October 31 to November 1 — marked the Celtic new year and the end of harvest, when the boundary with the spirit world was believed to thin. Early Irish manuscripts say the Samhain fire was lit at Tlachtga, now called the Hill of Ward near Athboy, and that all the fires of Ireland were rekindled from it. Archaeologists have found evidence the hill was a feasting and gathering site more than 2,000 years ago. The festival celebrating it is proudly modern: Fáilte Ireland created the Púca Festival in 2019, specifically to claim Ireland’s title as the home of Halloween, and it’s now based in Trim and Athboy. Trim is worth the trip on its own — Trim Castle, built from the late 12th century, is the largest Norman castle in Ireland.

Did you know?

The original jack-o’-lantern was not a pumpkin. It was a turnip. Irish tradition carved turnips for the tale of Jack, the blacksmith who tricked the Devil and was condemned to wander the earth with a flame in a hollowed-out turnip — an original “ghost turnip” from around 1900 is on display at the National Museum of Ireland – Country Life. Pumpkins are the American upgrade. (Bonus: Trim Castle stood in for York in Braveheart.)

Go see. The Púca Festival runs over Halloween weekend (roughly October 29–November 1). In Trim: the Gathering of the Spirits procession past the castle, Big Top concerts and comedy, and the Harvest Market. In Athboy: the lighting of the Samhain Fire at the Hill of Ward, guided tours of Tlachtga, and foraging walks. The street events, processions, and markets are largely free; concerts and special events are ticketed. The wider Spirits of Meath season runs through October into early November with 100+ events, so the county leans in for a full month.

6. Mexico City — not Halloween, and that’s the point

The history. Día de Muertos (November 1–2) is not Mexico’s version of Halloween, and the distinction is the whole reason to go. Halloween is about fear and mischief. Day of the Dead is about reunion: families build ofrendas — altars with photos, candles, marigolds (cempasúchil), water, and the departed’s favorite food and drink, including pan de muerto — to welcome their loved ones back, and keep vigil in cemeteries through the night. The tradition blends Indigenous Mesoamerican remembrance with the Catholic All Saints’ and All Souls’ days brought by Spanish colonizers, and UNESCO inscribed it on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. The famous skeleton face at the center of it all, La Catrina, is much newer than people think — see below.

Did you know?

La Catrina started as political satire, not as a costume. Printmaker José Guadalupe Posada created her around 1910 as La Calavera Garbancera, mocking Mexicans who rejected their Indigenous roots for European fashions — her point was that death makes everyone equal. Diego Rivera gave her the elegant dress, the full figure, and the name “La Catrina” in his 1946–47 mural. And the city’s giant Day of the Dead parade? It didn’t exist until 2016. The 2015 James Bond film Spectre opened with a fictional one, visitors arrived expecting it, and Mexico City liked the idea so much it made the parade real. It is now genuinely beloved — recent editions have drawn well over a million people along the route, per the city government.

Go see. The Gran Desfile (the big parade) rolls down Paseo de la Reforma to the Zócalo during Día de Muertos weekend — free, enormous, and joyful. Before and after: the Ofrenda Monumental, a mega-altar standing in the Zócalo in the days around November 1–2; the Catrinas procession; Coyoacán’s altars and markets; and the Diego Rivera mural museum to meet La Catrina in person. For the most moving night of the season, go to San Andrés Mixquic on November 2 for La Alumbrada, when thousands of candles light the cemetery as families hold vigil. Stay 4–5 nights — Mexico City is huge, the events are spread across it, and one big thing per day is the sane plan.

7. St. Helens, Oregon — the real Halloweentown

The history. In 1998, Disney filmed Halloweentown in this small Columbia River town about 30 miles northwest of Portland — the town square in the movie is the plaza in front of the historic Columbia County Courthouse on Strand Street. Most filming locations pack up and leave. St. Helens simply… didn’t. The town turned the movie into the Spirit of Halloweentown festival, rebuilt the film’s giant Jack O’Lantern in the courthouse plaza, and kept going. Cast members still return for meet-and-greets — and in a second pop-culture life, parts of Twilight were filmed here too.

14,000residents

90,000visitors a season

6×the town’s population

…descending on one small riverfront for a Disney Channel movie from 1998. Nostalgia is a powerful travel agent.

Go see. Spirit of Halloweentown runs weekends only (Saturdays and Sundays, roughly 11 AM–9 PM) from late September through Halloween, sometimes spilling into the first days of November. The giant pumpkin, Jack, is lit in the courthouse plaza each night around 8:30–9 PM. There’s a filming-location trolley (it runs until dark), a family haunted house, costume contests, stage shows, and a free Twilight walking tour.

8. Salem, Massachusetts — the famous one (I was just there)

The history. Salem was settled by Europeans in 1626 — on a site the Indigenous community knew as Naumkeag, “fishing place.” The witch trials of 1692–93 remain the darkest chapter in American colonial history: more than 200 people accused across some 25 communities, 30 convicted, 19 hanged, and Giles Corey pressed to death with stones for refusing to plead. The Witch House on Essex Street — home of trial judge Jonathan Corwin — is the only building still standing in Salem with direct ties to the trials. And here’s the thing the name doesn’t tell you: no accused witch ever lived there, and no trial was ever held there. It isn’t really a witch’s house at all — it’s the judge’s house. That’s exactly what makes walking through it so chilling.

Inside is a self-guided wander through the Corwins’ world: period-furnished rooms (the great hall with its enormous hearth, the parlor, the bedchambers above), and it’s the small objects that stay with you — a black shoe that was hidden inside a wall to ward off witches, and a poppet, the kind of little doll that was actually entered as evidence in the trials. But the exhibits do something I didn’t expect: they argue with the myths, out loud, on the wall. One panel asks, point-blank, “Was it epilepsy?” and answers no — the “falling sickness” was well known to the colonists by 1692, remedies for it were already in published medical books, and the “afflicted” girls showed no such symptoms before the outbreak or after the trials ended; the behavior lasted a very brief period. The period cures on display next to it: valerian, roses, lavender, and marigold. (The pharmacist in me had questions.)

The midwife panels are just as good: a lying-in chamber was sealed shut — windows, chimneys, even the door locks covered — not only for privacy, but because the devil was called the “prince of the air,” and a house was vulnerable wherever air could get in: through doors, windows, chimneys, thresholds. And a panel titled “Tituba’s Innocence” makes the record plain — the blame for the girls’ behavior fell largely and erroneously on Tituba, an enslaved woman in the Parris household; there’s no documentation she taught anyone magic, and the folk magic that does appear in the trial records, like Mary Sibley’s “witch cake” and Bridget Bishop’s poppets, was rooted in English lore, not hers. Maritime wealth came after, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, himself a descendant of a trial judge, put Salem on the literary map with The House of the Seven Gables (1851). The Halloween takeover is surprisingly recent: Haunted Happenings began in 1982 as a single weekend drawing about 50,000 people. It now draws more than a million visitors every October — to a city of about 45,000 residents.

It isn’t really a witch’s house at all — it’s the judge’s house.

Did you know?

Nobody was burned at the stake in Salem. It’s the most common Salem misconception there is: the 19 executed victims were hanged, Corey was pressed, and several others died in jail. Burning was never used in Salem.

Go see. I was there for the first weekend of October, and the rhythm of the place is this: Haunted Happenings runs the entire month, from the Grand Parade that opens it on the first Thursday of October straight through Halloween night. In between: the Witch House, the Salem Witch Museum, the House of the Seven Gables, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Witch Trials Memorial and the old Burying Point cemetery, ghost tours every night, markets on the weekends, and costumed chaos everywhere. Our own biggest day ran Seven Gables at midday, a tour inside the Witch House (go in — the inside is the whole point), the Witch Trials Memorial and cemetery, the Bewitched statue and the witch shops on Essex Street (Blackcraft, Hex, HausWitch — plus a tarot reading, because obviously), and a late-night ghost tour — ours was Spirits, Sinners & Scandals — to close the night. One tactical note on the Witch House: its tickets are sold online only, released at 8 AM on the morning of your visit, for that day alone — no advance sales — and in October they can be gone in minutes. Put the whole crew on ticket duty at 8 sharp. Three of us were online at eight; exactly one got through — me — and that’s the only reason we got our four tickets. That’s the correct order of operations, by the way: history in the daylight, haunting after dark. My honest take from being there: the first week of October gives you full decorations at a fraction of the peak crowd. The final weekend is the full crush — go then only if the crush is the point.

9. New Orleans, Louisiana — the party

The history. New Orleans was founded by the French in 1718, ruled by Spain from 1763 (the great fires of 1788 and 1794 destroyed over a thousand buildings, which is why today’s “French Quarter” is mostly Spanish Colonial architecture — the balconies and courtyards give it away), and sold to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Death is woven into the city’s fabric, not its calendar: Catholic All Saints’ traditions, devastating yellow fever epidemics, and the famous above-ground cemeteries — “cities of the dead” where family tombs are reused across generations. St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, established in 1789, is the oldest surviving cemetery in the city and holds the tomb of Vodou queen Marie Laveau. Since 2015, you can only enter with a licensed guided tour, a rule added after vandalism. The Krewe of BOO! became the city’s official Halloween parade in 2007, built by the Kern family, whose Kern Studios has been building Mardi Gras floats since 1932.

Did you know?

Nicolas Cage — alive and well — already owns his tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1: a roughly nine-foot white pyramid he bought in 2010, inscribed in Latin, a short walk from Marie Laveau’s tomb. It is now a standard stop on the official cemetery tour.

Go see. Krewe of BOO! rolls on the Saturday before Halloween — 15 floats, hundreds of riders, three miles through the French Quarter, free, genuinely family-friendly, with throws like pralines and light-up toys instead of beads. The season around it runs all October: the Frenchmen Street costume party on Halloween night, big haunted houses like The Mortuary, Boo at the Zoo for the little ones, the famous Skeleton House on St. Charles Avenue, and ghost, vampire, and cemetery tours nightly.

10. Sleepy Hollow, New York — the Headless Horseman’s hometown

The history. Dutch settlers called this Hudson Valley spot Slapershaven — “Sleepers’ Haven” — within the vast Philipsburg Manor estate. Washington Irving knew the area from teenage visits in the 1790s, and writing from England two decades later, he fused local Dutch lore with European tales of spectral riders into “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820): schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, chased by the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a Hessian soldier whose head was carried off by a cannonball in the Revolution. It became one of the first American stories to conquer the world. The story’s landmarks are real and still standing: the Old Dutch Church (built around 1685) and its burying ground, where the tale is set. Irving himself is buried in the adjacent Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, laid out in 1849 — a cemetery with its own remarkable guest list, including Andrew Carnegie, William Rockefeller, and Walter Chrysler.

Did you know?

The village only became “Sleepy Hollow” in 1996. For over a century it was North Tarrytown. When the General Motors plant — the town’s economic engine — closed, voters renamed the village after Irving’s fictional one, and rang the Old Dutch Church bell for the occasion. The town literally rebranded itself as a ghost story. It worked.

Go see. In October, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery runs two-hour evening lantern tours — nightly in October, with kerosene lanterns over about a mile and a half of hilly ground, plus an adults-only “Murder and Mayhem” version. The area’s other giant is the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor in nearby Croton-on-Hudson: 7,000+ hand-carved pumpkins, running select evenings from mid-September into early November — timed tickets only, none sold at the gate. Add Twilight Village at Philipsburg Manor on October weekends, dramatic readings of the Legend by the Old Dutch Church, Irving’s own home at Sunnyside in Tarrytown, and the Headless Horseman statue photo stop everyone queues for politely.

11. Savannah, Georgia — the year-round haunt

The history. Savannah was founded in 1733 by General James Oglethorpe as the first city of the Georgia colony, laid out around a grid of public squares — 22 survive in the Historic District, and the whole downtown feels designed for an evening walk. Bonaventure Cemetery began as a plantation in 1762 (some of its live-oak avenues were planted then); the city bought the roughly 100-acre property in 1907. The Mercer-Williams House on Monterey Square, completed in 1868 after a Civil War delay, was designed for a general whose family never actually lived in it — and became famous a century later as the setting of the 1981 shooting at the heart of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Layer colonial, Revolutionary, and Civil War history under all of it, add year-round ghost touring, and Visit Savannah itself lists 18+ spooky tours. Savannah doesn’t do haunted as a season. It’s a permanent condition.

Did you know?

The Bird Girl statue — the haunting figure on the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil cover — is not in Bonaventure Cemetery anymore. Sylvia Shaw Judson’s 1936 bronze sat unnoticed on a family plot for over 50 years until the cover photo made it famous; the crowds got so intense that the family removed it in 1997. She now lives at the Telfair Academy museum downtown. Go to the museum to see her, not the cemetery.

Go see. Ghost tours run nightly, year-round, in every format: walking tours through the squares, hearse tours, and the Ghosts & Gravestones trolley (expect roughly $30–45 per adult depending on the format — trolleys cost a bit more than walking tours, and prices creep up most years). By day: Bonaventure Cemetery (go in daylight, with a history guide — it’s a cemetery first), the Mercer-Williams House Museum, Forsyth Park, River Street, and the Sorrel-Weed House. Late-October extras include Wag-O-Ween (dog trick-or-treating at 100+ businesses, held the weekend before Halloween) and trick-or-treating on River Street. Full disclosure: I was not a believer until Savannah. On a haunted pub crawl there — the all-drinks-included kind, booked on Viator, and amazing — something shoved me in one of the squares, hard enough that I turned around expecting a person. Nobody there. And in the basement of the Sorrel-Weed House, it felt heavy down there — and more than once, I could feel what felt like a hand on me. I have no explanation for either. I’ve mostly stopped looking for one.

Sleep somewhere haunted. It’s half the point of Savannah — the historic inns here keep their ghosts the way other hotels keep amenities. I stayed at the Eliza Thompson House, an 1847 family home on Jones Street (widely called the prettiest street in the city) that became Savannah’s first bed and breakfast. Its stories are insane even by local standards: James, a Thompson son and Civil War veteran, was killed by a horse’s kick outside the house and is still seen standing in an upstairs window; a young woman in white drifts through the hallways; a child — possibly young Joseph, who died of fever at nine — is known for tugging blankets off sleeping guests and asking them to come out and play. Room 132 is the one ghost hunters request. And here’s the wild part: locals count the Eliza Thompson among the tamer haunted stays. The Marshall House served as a Civil War hospital through two yellow fever epidemics, and guests there report faucets turning themselves on; at the 17Hundred90 Inn, a ghost named Anne has claimed Room 204 — she moves your belongings, tugs your sheets, and is sometimes heard crying in the corridors. Give a haunted inn at least one night of the trip. Whether or not anything happens to you, you sleep differently knowing the stories.

12. St. Augustine, Florida — the warm one

The history. Founded September 8, 1565, by Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the continental United States — 42 years older than Jamestown, 55 older than Plymouth. The Castillo de San Marcos, built 1672–1695 from coquina (a local shell-stone), is the oldest masonry fort in the continental U.S., built to guard the treasure-fleet routes; it passed from Spain to Britain to Spain to the U.S. without ever being taken by force. The Old Jail ran from 1891 to 1953 before closing for deplorable conditions — Henry Flagler helped fund it because he wanted the jail moved away from his luxury hotel, and it was deliberately designed to look like a Victorian house rather than a prison. It held up to 72 prisoners, and eight documented hangings took place on site.

Did you know?

The lighthouse ghost story everyone tells gets one detail wrong. In 1873, during construction of the current lighthouse tower, a supply cart flipped into the water with four girls trapped beneath it. Three drowned, not two: Mary (15) and Eliza (13) Pittee, the superintendent’s daughters — and a 10-year-old African-American girl whose name was never recorded, and whose resting place museum researchers have never been able to find. The lighthouse museum tells her part of the story too, and it’s the version worth repeating. (Runner-up fact: the Castillo’s coquina walls famously absorbed cannonballs instead of shattering — one British account said they went in “like a knife into cheese.”)

Go see. The Old Jail After Dark runs hands-on paranormal investigations — guests are trained on real ghost-hunting equipment like EMF meters and spirit boxes, in small groups, inside the actual jail. At the lighthouse, the Dark of the Moon ghost tour (running since 2006) climbs where the TV crews have filmed — Ghost Hunters shot an episode here. By day: the Castillo (a National Park Service site; go early), St. George Street, the Huguenot and Tolomato cemeteries from the sidewalk, and the whole compact, walkable historic district.

13. Edinburgh, Scotland — the fire festival

The history. Edinburgh’s Halloween lineage is real, but let me be precise about it, because precision is this post’s whole thing: Samhain is an ancient Gaelic festival marking the end of harvest and the start of the darker half of the year. Edinburgh did not celebrate it uninterrupted for two thousand years — the modern Samhuinn Fire Festival is a revival, created by the Beltane Fire Society in 1995 and held on Calton Hill since 2018. What Edinburgh does have, in layers no revival needs to invent: the South Bridge Vaults, completed in 1788, a warren of chambers under the city’s arches that housed taverns and workshops, then Edinburgh’s poorest residents in damp and darkness — and were then forgotten, until an excavation in 1985 rediscovered evidence that people had lived down there. Greyfriars Kirkyard, where some 1,200 captured Covenanters were held in an open-air prison after the Battle of Bothwell Brig in 1679, many dying there — buried a short walk from the mausoleum of their prosecutor, “Bloody” Mackenzie. And Burke and Hare, who in 1827–28 murdered 16 people and sold the bodies to anatomist Dr. Robert Knox.

Did you know?

Burke got the fate he sold. After Hare turned evidence against him, Burke was hanged on January 28, 1829 — and then publicly dissected, exactly the end he’d delivered his victims to. The professor reportedly wrote a note in Burke’s own blood. Burke’s skeleton is still held by the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum, and a pocketbook bound in his tanned skin is on display at the Surgeons’ Hall Museum. Edinburgh does not do anything by halves. (One caution you’ll hear on vault tours: the story that Burke and Hare stored bodies in the South Bridge Vaults has no actual proof. It’s a rumor wearing a tour-guide vest.)

Go see. The Samhuinn Fire Festival takes Calton Hill on Halloween night — gates in the early evening, the bonfire lit after dark, hundreds of performers, fire-play, drumming, and the battle of Summer and Winter, all overseen by the Cailleach. It’s adult-energy (semi-nudity is part of it; under-16s need a ticketed adult) and tickets sell through the festival’s official seller in tiers that sell out — book the moment your year’s edition goes on sale. In the week or so around it, Mercat Tours runs a special Halloween programme into the Blair Street Underground Vaults, including adults-only late tours. By day: the Real Mary King’s Close, a sealed 17th-century street beneath the Royal Mile; Greyfriars Kirkyard; Edinburgh Castle; and the Surgeons’ Hall Museums, where Burke’s pocketbook waits.

One last thought

Spooky season looks different everywhere. Salem does history with a million of your closest friends. Derry does it because fifty people in costume refused to go home in 1985. Anoka does it because the teenagers would not stop tipping over outhouses. Mexico City does something else entirely — something older, warmer, and not Halloween at all — and Meath does the original, on the hill where the fire was lit.

The best version of this trip is the one that matches what you’re actually after: the crush, the history, the party, or the meaning.

Dreaming of a spooky-season getaway? Comment LETSGO — or tap “Let’s Plan Your Trip” — and let’s plan it.

Travel smarter. Laugh harder. Explore deeper. Live kinder. 🩷

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Photo credits

• Bran Castle: Ryanjoejohnmccleary via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Derry Guildhall: Acediscovery via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
• Trim Castle: Martin Kerans via geograph.org.uk, CC BY-SA 2.0
• Bourbon Street at night: Dan Lang via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
• Sleepy Hollow Cemetery: Acroterion via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Bonaventure Cemetery: Bubba73 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Castillo de San Marcos: Juliancolton via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Halloweentown pumpkin, St. Helens: Nicci Schu via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
• Edinburgh Castle at dusk: Gary Campbell-Hall via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
• Whitby Abbey: Simon Gough via Pexels. Mexico City Catrina parade: Pexels (free to use, no attribution required). Anoka parade photos: Chelsea’s own photos, October 2026.
• Witch House interior photos (window portrait and epilepsy-cures display): Chelsea’s own photos, October 2026.