Three ways for grown-ups to celebrate the spooky season
- 10/19/11
- Categorized in: Lifestyle
Once a night for children to go door-to-door in homemade costumes in search of treats, Halloween has become an often multi-day celebration with more adults than children joining in the fun. Here are three local opportunities for adults who want to get in the spirit of the season.
The 11th annual Little 5 Points Halloween Festival & Parade
Little 5 Points, which straddles the line separating Fulton and DeKalb counties, is the site of what festival organizers are calling the Southeast’s largest Halloween celebration—the Little 5 Points Halloween Festival & Parade.
“What began 10 years ago as a community festival celebrating the creativity, independence and diversity of Little 5 Points, has become a nationally recognized event,” organizers state in a news release.
Unlike many Halloween celebrations, this one is not just a nocturnal party. It starts at noon on Oct. 22 and continues until 11 p.m. The award-winning festival features live music, street entertainment, outdoor beverage vendors and Little 5 Points restaurant and retail promotions. The live music on three main stages features headliner Yacht Rock Revue at the Variety Playhouse Stage and 20 other groups. There also will be an artists market on Colquitt Avenue, a Halloween costume contest, and the festival highlight—the Halloween street parade, starting at 4 p.m.
The festival is free and open to the public and is located in and around Findley Plaza at the intersection of Moreland and Euclid avenues. For more information call (404) 683-3424 or visit www.L5Phalloween.com.
A Tour of Southern Ghosts
A Tour of Southern Ghosts returns to Stone Mountain Park for its 26th year. Held as an annual fundraiser for Stone Mountain’s ART Station, A Tour of Southern Ghosts is not a haunted house experience. It’s a storytelling festival that showcases Southern ghost stories offered by professional storytellers from across the South and representing a number of traditions, including Appalachian, Native American and African American.
On the lantern-lit guided “tour of yesteryear” inside the Stone Mountain Park mansion, “Each story takes the same amount of time, so that when visitors finish at one location, they can move on to the next and the storyteller there will be ready for them,” said ART Station President and Art Director David Thomas.
The stories, Thomas said, are drawn from real-life legends, but are built from fragments of stories of more than one person reporting having seen the same ghost. He said the stories aren’t too scary even for young visitors, adding “most of them are funny.”
The tours, which continue through Oct. 31, are Thursdays through Sundays, beginning at 7 p.m., with tours starting every 10 minutes. There is an additional evening of tours on Halloween. On Thursdays and Sundays, tours end at 9 p.m.; on Fridays and Saturdays tours conclude at 9:30 p.m. Each night offers a different cast of six storytellers, which means audience members may return to A Tour of Southern Ghosts on additional nights to hear a new collection of stories. For more information, visit www.stonemountainpark.com.
Slow Down Atlanta
PushPush Theatre offers what officials there call “a new take on death, afterlife and modern culture” as it launches the pilot episode of its original production Slow Down Atlanta, an office series that is part contemporary satire and part ghost-story mystery. “The show, which enjoys equal parts horror and humor, focuses on a group of slack 30-somethings who start an Atlanta-based paranormal services company called Partners Paranormal for beer money,” according to PushPush officials. Performances are at 8 p.m., Oct. 20, 21, 24, 27, 28 and Halloween night, Monday, Oct. 31. Tickets are $12 - $25, offered on a pay-what-you-can basis. PushPush Theater is located at 121 New Street # 4, Decatur. For more information, call (404) 377-6332 or visit www.pushpushtheater.com.