Why New Orleans Owns Halloween

🎃 No Tricks, Just the Truth About America’s Spookiest City 🎃

When it comes to Halloween, most cities throw up a few plastic skeletons, string some orange lights, and call it a night.

New Orleans? We build a full-on haunted spectacle with marching monsters, voodoo queens, brass bands, fire breathers, glittering ghouls, and a parade that makes Halloween feel like Mardi Gras in costume... oh wait, that’s every day here.

Welcome to the Crescent City, where October is basically our Supernatural Super Bowl—and the Krewe of BOO! is our victory lap.

👻 We Don’t Celebrate Halloween. We Haunt It.

Other cities carve pumpkins. We carve legacies. In NOLA, Halloween isn’t just a night—it’s a season-long celebration of the weird, the wild, and the wonderfully undead. Ghost tours, haunted houses, cemetery strolls, vampire balls, voodoo rituals, and costume parties that would make Dracula blush.

And leading the charge? The Krewe of BOO!—our annual Halloween parade where zombies strut, skeletons dance, and “throw me something, mister” turns into “throw me something spooky!”

🧟‍♀️ We Kick Things Off with a Zombie Stampede

Before the floats roll and the confetti flies, the city gets chased by a horde of sweaty, undead runners in the New Orleans Zombie Run. Yes, it’s a costumed 2-mile race. Yes, there are actual zombies. Yes, there’s beer at the finish line. You haven’t truly lived until you’ve outrun a chainsaw-wielding ghoul down Decatur Street at 9 a.m.

🎭 Our Parades Come with Fangs, Fog, and Funk

Krewe of BOO! isn’t your average Halloween parade. Forget school bands and waving politicians. We’ve got monster-themed floats, marching werewolves, and vampires slinging candy and custom throws straight into your haunted little hands.

There’s brass music blaring. There’s fog rolling. There’s a dancing Frankenstein high-fiving your toddler while sipping a daiquiri. Where else does this happen?

🍹 We Turn Every Bar into a Haunted Mansion

Halloween in NOLA means your neighborhood dive bar suddenly has cobwebs, potion-themed cocktails, and a DJ dressed like Beetlejuice spinning bounce remixes until 4 a.m.

And the Monster Mash after-party? It’s the cherry on top of our ghoulish sundae—an epic costume bash with live music, local bites, and dancing that’ll raise the dead (or at least your heart rate).

🕯 We Live With Ghosts—and Party With Them Too

This city isn’t just Halloween-themed. It’s haunted by design. We’ve got above-ground cemeteries, voodoo temples, haunted mansions, and enough ghost stories to fill a library—plus tour guides who’ll tell them to you with a cocktail in hand.

When the veil gets thin in October, we don’t get scared. We get dressed, get dancing, and get down with the spirits—in both the supernatural and cocktail sense.

🎃 The Bottom Line?

New Orleans doesn’t “do” Halloween. We own it. We hex harder. We party longer. We costume better. And we turn the entire city into a haunted playground where everyone—from the tiniest trick-or-treater to the sassiest drag vampire—gets to let their inner monster out to play.

So if you’re wondering where to spend spooky season this year, here’s your answer:

🕸️ Come to New Orleans. Halloween lives here. 🕸️