Halloween Events in Tri-Cities, Tennessee

Jump to this season's halloween events ↓

Town by town

• Bristol runs the busiest October of the four. Believe in Bristol's Halloween Parade is only a few years old and already lines State Street with thousands of people. There are ghost walks downtown and through East Hill Cemetery, where the town's founders are buried on both sides of the state line, and Steele Creek Park dresses its little train up as the Spooky Express on October weekends.
• Jonesborough does Halloween the way it does everything: on Main Street, with stories. At the Great Jonesborough Pumpkin Party families carve on Courthouse Square, and the finished jack-o'-lanterns light a trail down Main Street through Halloween night. The town's calendar has the rest.
• Johnson City — Tipton-Haynes State Historic Site puts on Stories from the Pumpkin Patch: tellers from the Jonesborough storytelling guild, Halloween crafts, a hayride, and the site's cave if you're brave. Out in the county the corn mazes go haunted after dark.
• Kingsport — at Bays Mountain the rangers hand out pumpkins to carve, then give them to the park's animals as enrichment, and you get to watch the animals take them apart. The Kingsport Farmers Market throws a Boo Fest with trick-or-treating among the vendors.
• Piney Flats — Rocky Mount, the capitol of the Southwest Territory in 1790–92, runs Haunting on the Mount: night tours of the old house with a ghost story in every room.

Trunk-or-treat season

Churches, fire halls, sheriff's offices and shopping centers hold trunk-or-treats (and the odd tent-or-treat) the last two weekends of October. It's candy out of decorated car trunks in a lit parking lot, which beats walking a county road in the dark. They're mostly free, mostly early evening and mostly posted late, so the list below fills in as the month goes. Door-to-door trick-or-treat hours are each town's call; your city's website has them, and the neighborhood group chat has them sooner.

For the grown-ups

The breweries, cideries and downtown bars hold costume parties and themed nights the weekend before Halloween. Some are 21+, and the listing will say so. The haunted corn mazes and haunted trails are built to actually scare you. Some also run a daytime family day with the lights on, billed as such, so read the listing before you bring an eight-year-old to the night one.

Realities

• The first weekend of October belongs to the National Storytelling Festival and Erwin's Apple Festival. Most of the Halloween calendar lands in the last two weeks.
• The night tours and ghost walks take small groups on set nights, so buy ahead wherever the listing links a ticket.
• Late-October nights in the valleys get cold. Put a layer under the costume, and wear boots to a corn maze after rain.
• Dates move a little every year. What's written here is the usual pattern, and the cards below have this year's dates.

Below: this year's Halloween events from our calendar, each linking to its source. Harvest fairs and apple festivals are on the Fall Festivals page, and leaf season is on Fall Color.