A Guide to Brooklyn's Best Family-Friendly Halloween Events

Costume bought? Trick-or-treat ready? Here are Brooklyn’s spookiest family-friendly events this Halloween season, for optimal creepy fun.

Pumpkin Carving. 303 Berry Street. Free. 5:30-7 p.m. on Wednesday, October 21.
NYC Parks’ community gardening program GreenThumb is holding a pumpkin carving workshop. Carving tools will be supplied, but Bring Your Own Gourd and decorative supplies.

Gravesend Inn. Voorhees Theatre at 186 Jay Street. $5 for students, $8 for adults. Hours vary, October 22-24 and 29-31.
Spooking Brooklynites since 1999, The Gravesend Inn returns for its seasonal haunted hotel. Created by Downtown Brooklyn’s New York City College of Technology’s resident theater troupe Theatreworks, the high-tech haunt promises a theme-park-quality children for the young and old alike.

Creepy Crawly Halloween. Prospect Park Audubon Center. Free. 1-4:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, October 24 and 25.
Hosted by the Parks Department, this workshop makes nature seasonally relevant by having fun with some of the animal kingdom’s grosser — creepier, if you will — aspects. The workshop will consist of owl pellet dissection, a “Creepy Crawly Walk” searching for some of the spookier dwellers in Prospect Park’s, and an Animal Encounter, to witness a live feeding. The first two activities will be an hour each, the Animal Encounter 30 minutes long.

Ghouls & Gourds. Cherry Esplanade. Free for kids under 12 and members; otherwise $15 for adults, $10 for students and seniors. 12-5:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 24.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden has made some big promises for its Ghouls & Gourds festival, which will host what is allegedly Brooklyn’s Wackiest Costume Parade, in addition to such activities as brussels sprout bowling, caterpillar feeding and “Stilt Dance Insanity.” There will also be performances throughout the day, including retro jazz band Baby Soda and “Brooklyn-style Mexican rock” group Pistolera. A Children’s Book Barn Community Bookstore Pop-up shop will be available throughout the day, in addition to various workshops.

Brooklyn Bridge Park Harvest Festival. Pier 6 Lawns. Free. 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, October, 24.
The Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy and many of its partners are joining together on Pier 6 for the fifth annual family harvest festival. The weekend before Halloween, the seasonal party will include pumpkin carving, a spooky walk, and live performances by the Deedle Deedle Dees, Shine and the Moonbeams, and others.

Fort Greene Park Halloween Festival. Fort Greene Park. Free. 12-3 p.m. on Saturday, October 31.
Annual family-friendly spook-abration, with hayrides, face painting, a pumpkin patch and the popular dog costume contest The Great PUPkin. It’s Fort Greene Park Conservancy’s largest event of the year, so bring the kids or just the dog — Donald The Dog Trump is expected to be a popular costume this year.

BAMboo!. 30 Lafayette Avenue. Free. 2-5 p.m. on Saturday, October 31.
BAM is hosting a monster mash for Brooklyn’s littlest ghouls and goblins. The outdoor party will feature Abby the DJ, a costume contest, arts and crafts, carnival games, and trick-or-treats. BAM will also be screening The Nightmare Before Christmas (deceptively titled, the stop-motion Tim Burton classic is set in Halloween Town).

Halloween 313. 313 Clinton Avenue. Free. 5-9 p.m. on Saturday, October 31.
Claiming to be Brooklyn’s most elaborate Halloween spectacle, 313 Clinton Avenue has been growing since its 1994 founding as a local safe-house for trick-or-treaters. With some of the most elaborate decorations in the neighborhood, 313 Clinton Street hosts a haunted house in its parlor, a front yard graveyard, and “frightastically” good live show Malice in Underland.

[Photo: Brooklyn Reader]

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