"I don't know if our downtown would be quite what it is without Halloweentown, to be honest."
That's Breezy Riggs, co-owner of Endlessound Records on Old Town's main strip, talking to The Daily Chronicle about what October does to St. Helens. It's a fair assessment. During the festival each fall, this city of roughly 14,000 people on the Columbia River hosts something closer to 90,000 visitors, all coming to stand in the same Plaza Square where Disney Channel filmed "Halloweentown" back in 1998.
If you already live here, none of that is news. You've watched the public works crews haul out the storage bins every September. You know the giant fiberglass jack-o'-lantern goes up in Plaza Square before anything else, the same way it did in the movie. What's actually worth your attention this year isn't the fact that St. Helens does this. It's that the city is considering a parade return for 2026 while continuing to streamline the festival's operations.
What Isn't Changing
The bones of Spirit of Halloweentown are the same as always. The festival opens September 27 and runs through Halloween, October 31, with the core weekend program falling on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Halloween itself lands on a Saturday this year, putting it on the festival's closing date rather than in a separate weekday session. Check the official calendar for exact hours, since the schedule has varied year to year depending on where October 31 falls on the calendar. General admission to the plaza and the food vendor area stays free. The nightly pumpkin lighting still happens in the same square where Marnie Piper's grandmother ran her magic shop on screen, and the Masonic Building still anchors the ticketed attractions, past years have rotated in an alien exhibit, an oddities museum, and Brad's World Reptiles. Check-in for tickets and lost and found still sits at the entrance arch on South First Street.
None of that needed fixing. What did need fixing is the part that got too popular for its own structure.
The Parade St. Helens Is Considering for 2026
Here's the piece of this story that doesn't show up in the travel write-ups. The original Halloweentown parade wasn't a city program. It started in 1998, organized by local civic groups celebrating the film's release. It went dark for a few years, got revived as a one-day event by the St. Helens Tourism Committee, and eventually passed to the city itself once that committee disbanded. From there, the city began contracting outside event companies to run the whole festival, and starting in 2024, that contract went to a Portland-based outfit called Treadway Events, now entering its third season at the helm in 2026.
Somewhere in that scaling-up, the parade itself, the piece most tied to St. Helens' own residents rather than outside visitors, got discontinued in 2024. It had simply grown too large for the volunteer effort that built it to manage safely. According to The Daily Chronicle's reporting, the city's event organizer, Hummel, said she hopes to work with the parade's original organizer to bring it back in 2026, possibly with a shorter route, which would mark its return after a two-year absence.
That's a small operational detail if you don't live here. If you do, it's the actual headline. It means the parade may return in 2026 alongside a festival managed under a professional events contract. Watch for whether it returns, and in what form, as part of the festival's evolving program.
The Parking Change You'll Actually Feel
While the parade question sorts itself out, the logistics side got simpler. For years, weekend visitors parked at satellite lots and rode a shuttle into Old Town. That system is gone for 2026. The event's official parking page now sells passes for parking near the heart of the festival directly, no shuttle required, with onsite parking running $30 per vehicle if you don't reserve ahead.
For residents, this cuts two ways. It likely means less shuttle congestion on the roads feeding those satellite lots. It also means more cars converging directly on streets closer to downtown on weekend afternoons, since visitors no longer have a reason to park farther out. If you live within walking distance of Old Town, or you're used to grabbing a parking spot on First Street on a Saturday afternoon that has nothing to do with Halloween, this is the year to plan around it rather than assume last year's pattern holds.
Why the Storefronts Look Different in September
By the time the festival opens, most Old Town shops are already carrying Halloween merchandise, and a fair number stock items tied to the other film St. Helens is known for: portions of the "Twilight" series were also shot downtown, and its fan base overlaps heavily with the Halloweentown crowd. That's not incidental set dressing. It's the same dynamic Riggs pointed to. A city this size doesn't organically support a downtown retail strip built for the festival's busiest weekends without the festival underwriting a chunk of that traffic the rest of the year.
That's worth sitting with if you've ever wondered why a town of 14,000 has a record shop, a working theater, and a walkable historic core instead of the strip-mall pattern you'd expect at that population. The festival isn't decoration on top of an already-thriving downtown. For a meaningful slice of the year, it's the reason that downtown has the customer base to stay open.
Planning Around the Festival
If you're mapping out your own October around this instead of just tolerating the traffic, the practical shape looks like this:
- September 27 through October 31: the core festival runs Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., with the Masonic Building attractions, the haunted house, and stage performances active both days.
- Weekends have historically carried their own identity, a parade-and-costume weekend, a car and hot rod cruise, a witches-on-the-water weekend along the riverfront, though the exact themed lineup for 2026 hadn't been finalized as of this writing. Check the event's own calendar close to each weekend if you want to plan around a specific one.
- Halloween itself, October 31, falls at the tail end of the run this year since October 31 is a Saturday. Past years have sometimes closed with a standalone weekday session built around trick-or-treating at Old Town businesses instead of the full attraction slate, so it's worth confirming this year's exact hours rather than assuming last year's schedule.
If your household has small kids who do better with less crowd density, the daytime Saturday and Sunday blocks in late September tend to draw smaller numbers than the final two weekends before Halloween, when celebrity guest appearances and the last-chance factor pull in visitors from well outside Columbia County.
The Bigger Pattern Worth Watching
Step back and the throughline is this. St. Helens didn't set out to build a tourist economy around two movies filmed here decades apart. It grew into one, weekend by weekend, until the volunteer parade that started the whole tradition couldn't keep up with what it had built. The city's answer wasn't to shut that piece down for good. It's to professionalize the parts that needed it, the parking, the ticketing, the vendor logistics, while considering how local residents might help shape the parade if it returns.
That's a more interesting story than "small town becomes Halloween destination," and it's the one actually playing out in Columbia County this fall. Whether the parade comes back this year, and what role it will play in the festival, is worth watching if you live anywhere near the river.
If you're already part of this community, you don't need a reason to pay attention to what happens downtown this October. But if you're weighing whether Columbia County's small-town rhythm, riverfront setting, and walkable Old Town core fits what you're looking for in a home, Carrie Welch has spent years helping buyers and sellers navigate exactly this stretch of the Columbia River, and is always glad to talk through what makes a specific block or neighborhood here work for your life, Halloweentown season or not.
