fbpx
Skip to content

Meet the World Capital for All Things Halloween

by Amy Felegy

A large jack-o-lantern structure near a flagpole, building, and tree.
Photo Credit: Amy Felegy
A city square in downtown Anoka is alit with Halloween lights and decorations.

In Anoka, Minnesota, Halloween is more than a day—it's a month-long celebration over 100 years in the making.


Halloween may be on Thursday, but for one Minnesota city, it’s every day.

Year round, volunteers in Anoka prep for its monthlong festival that can be traced back to the very first known modern-day Halloween celebrations. The city hosted its first celebration in 1920, even before modern trick-or-treating was a thing.

A glowing jack-o-lantern structure at nighttime.
Photo Credit: Anoka County Historical Society
A winking light-up pumpkin display has sat on the Anoka City Hall roof for over 30 years each October.

Now, you take a walk down Main Street and find just about every storefront window donned with skeletons, jack-o-lanterns, and hairy sights. It’s all hands on deck to ornament blocks and plan events across town—from yard decorating competitions, pumpkin weigh-offs, parades, movies, and kids art nights.

Just ask Rebecca Ebnet-Desens, Anoka County Historical Society’s executive director. She calls the whole scene a “collective joy,” a group movement of pure celebration.

“People bleed orange. The town is absolutely 100 percent in on the holiday,” Ebnet-Desens says.

“I don’t know if Anoka would know [itself] without Halloween as the centerpiece identity.”

Toil and Trouble: Where It Started

Over a hundred years ago, kids were still kids: Anoka residents were fed up with youngsters’ pranks and antics (including putting horse carriages on the high school roof, or letting cows escape—who then found the schoolhouse and munched on books).

Three people smile on a parade float next to a large pumpkin.
Photo Credit: Anoka County Historical Society
Anoka Halloween royalty (from left to right) Anoka Princess Karen George, Miss Anoka Holly Lysdahl, and Anoka Princess Karen Kind on a pre-1980 parade float. Karen George said her leg went through the floor of the float at her first parade.

The solution?

“Every [resident of] Anoka, the neighboring farms and communities [is] expected to take part in a very novel party, which will be held in our downtown streets” as written in a Historical Society document from October 1920, referencing the night before Halloween. Enter a costume parade, music, and “fun-making equipment,” it says (we’re guessing pumpkin carving supplies or confetti.)

“When they started this a hundred years ago, it was a minimal event to just give the teenagers something to do, something for people to connect to, something fun to celebrate,” Ebnet-Desens says.

While it’s still that, much has evolved in the century since. The only time the festival was canceled was during World War II, and each year changes its personality slightly.

The whole month is what Ebnet-Desens calls a “symbiotic relationship,” not just for 15-year-olds and bibliophilic cows, but for local businesses and the city at large. Wear the year’s custom Anoka Halloween button and receive discounts at certain area shops.

People connect over the yearly festivities, including a bonfire, pumpkin carving contest, and ambassador coronation. They find merriment in planning and ritual (cauldrons, anyone?)

After this year’s big jamboree, it’s already prep time for October 2025. And if you still feel like playing a few harmless tricks come Halloween-time, we won’t tell.