Denver Halloween Events 2026

The short version: two real 21+ costume parties run Denver Halloween night. Coloween takes over Bounce Empire in Lafayette, open bar, $1,000 costume contest, from $79, 9 PM to 3 AM. Paranormal Palace takes over the DoubleTree DTC in Greenwood Village, 8 PM to 1 AM. The rest of this page is haunts, daytime events, and smaller 21+ and 18+ nights.

Halloween 2026 lands on a Saturday, October 31, the first since 2020. Denver’s season runs September 11 through November 14. Below is every event we could verify, sorted by type, with the source for each date.

This Weekend

Updated August 23, 2026. Nothing is open yet. The season opens Friday, September 11, when 13th Floor and The Frightmare Compound both start their runs. The first full weekend is September 18 to 20, with the Colorado Festival of Horror at the Denver Marriott Tech Center. Pumpkin patches follow the week after. We update this block every Thursday through November 1.

The Whole Season on One Timeline

Everything below has a date because somebody published one. Events still waiting on their organizer are listed further down, without dates, because guessing at one is how a family ends up at a locked gate.

Halloween Night Itself: Saturday, October 31

Six things run against each other on the night. Coloween at Bounce Empire in Lafayette and Paranormal Palace at the DoubleTree DTC are the two full-scale 21+ productions. DarknessCon’s masquerade ball is the cheap ticket at $10. Haunted Field of Screams and Elitch Gardens both run late. And the Denver Zoo holds its sensory-friendly night, which is the answer for a family that needs a quieter room.

One detail nobody markets: daylight saving ends at 2 AM that night, so 2 AM happens twice and Halloween 2026 is 25 hours long. Anything running past 2 AM gains an hour. Sunset in Denver is 5:59 PM.

Halloween parties, ours and theirs

We run one of these, so read this section knowing that. The honest summary: Paranormal Palace is the closest thing to our format and it starts an hour earlier, DarknessCon is a tenth of the price, and Meow Wolf has nothing at all on Halloween night despite what their national marketing suggests.

Haunted houses and scream parks

Five serious haunts inside the metro, and they run for weeks rather than one night, so this is the part of the season you can actually spread out. Terror in the Corn at Anderson Farms is the closest to Boulder County. 13th Floor runs the longest, into mid-November.

Culture, music and film

The part of the season most Halloween roundups skip. Two of these run on Halloween night itself, and the Symphony’s October 31 showing is a matinee, so you can do it and still be out for the evening.

Family, farms and daytime

Farms, patches, zoo nights and the free city events. Two things to read carefully here: Arvada’s trick-or-treat is on Friday October 30, not Halloween, and the Denver Zombie Crawl has not run since 2024.

Costume races

Three costume races, and none of them is quite where its name suggests. MonsterDASH’s half marathon is in Louisville the day after the Denver 5K. Kooky-Spooky starts in Golden. Trick or Trot starts in Centennial.

Día de los Muertos

Día de los Muertos is November 1 and 2. It is its own holiday with its own history, not a Halloween theme and not a costume occasion, and it gets its own section here for that reason. Most Denver institutions publish their programming in late September or October, so this section is thin on purpose today and will fill in.

Coloween, and Who Should Skip It

We produce Coloween, so here it is with the sales varnish off. It is the 19th annual, on Saturday October 31 at Bounce Empire in Lafayette, 25 minutes northwest of downtown Denver. We take over the whole building, which is the world’s largest indoor inflatable park. Open bar pours from 9 PM to 3 AM. There are two ticket types: Early Entry VIP gets in at 9 PM with snacks included, General Admission at 10 PM, and the open bar covers both. The costume contest pays $1,000 cash. It is capped at 1,200 people and it is 21+. Opening tier is $79 and tickets are on sale now.

Skip it if any of this is you. You want to stay in Denver proper: we are in Lafayette, and that is a real drive and a real rideshare bill at 3 AM. You want a quiet night: this is 1,200 people, loud house music, and no corner of the room where you can hold a conversation. You are bringing kids: it is 21+ with no exceptions. You do not want to wear a costume: almost everyone does, and you will feel like the one who did not. You want to spend under $20: DarknessCon’s ball is $10 and it is genuinely good. Or you would rather be scared than dance, in which case book a haunt and keep your money.

What we are actually good at is one specific thing: a room where everybody committed, your drinks are handled, and the production is the point. If that is the night you want, tickets are on sale now. If it is not, several better options for you are in the tables above.

What We Could Not Confirm

These events are real and they usually happen. Their organizers had not published 2026 dates when we last checked, so they appear here without one. We would rather show you a gap than a guess.

• NOCTURNAL (Bierstadt Lagerhaus, Denver). A 21+ open-bar party in RiNo with a $2,500 costume prize. Their site still advertises October 31, 2025, which was a Friday, and their ticket listing is marked ended. Nothing is posted for 2026. Worth watching, not worth planning around yet. Check the source.
• Tracks Halloweekend (Tracks, Denver). Denver’s biggest LGBTQ+ club runs a Halloween weekend every year, and it is one of the best costume crowds in the city. Their public calendar currently ends in September, so 2026 dates are not up. Check the source.
• Black Lagoon at Lady Jane (Lady Jane, Denver). A horror-themed cocktail pop-up that takes the bar over for the season, with drag performances on weekend nights. Denver is on the pop-up’s current location list, but no 2026 dates are published by either the bar or the pop-up. Check the source.
• The Nightmare Bar (The Church Nightclub, Denver). A 90-minute immersive horror bar inside a converted cathedral. Tickets are not on sale for 2026 and the venue’s own October calendar stops mid-month. Check the source.
• Trick or Treat Street, Larimer Square (Larimer Square, Denver). A free downtown afternoon of trick-or-treating at the block’s businesses, which ran for the first time in 2025. Larimer Square’s 2026 calendar currently stops in early October with nothing Halloween on it. Do not go by last year’s date. Check the source.
• Denver Zombie Crawl (Historically Larimer Square, Denver). For years this was the biggest free all-ages costume event in the city. It has not run since October 2024, its organizers have posted nothing since, and no 2026 edition is announced. Worse, an unaffiliated 21+ ticketed bar crawl now markets itself under the same name using stale 2025 dates. If you see a Denver Zombie Crawl ticket for sale, it is not this event. Check the source.

Two traps worth knowing about, because they caught us while we built this. First, a promoter’s own website can be live and still be last year’s: NOCTURNAL currently advertises October 31, 2025, and Elitch’s Frightopia page is a 2025 leftover. October 31 was a Friday in 2025 and is a Saturday in 2026, so the weekday is the tell. Second, a dormant event’s name can get picked up by somebody else, which is what happened to the Denver Zombie Crawl.

How This Page Is Verified

Every date above was read off the organizer’s own website, not off an aggregator and not off Google’s event carousel. That distinction is not academic: Google’s events pack currently lists DarknessCon’s venue in a city the promoter’s own ticket page contradicts, and we found four separate listings across the metro still showing 2025 dates as though they were live.

Where a source disagreed with itself we say so on the entry rather than picking the answer we liked. Where nobody published a date, the row is blank. We re-check the blank rows weekly through October, and we update the "This Weekend" block every Thursday. Everything here sits inside about an hour of Denver.

Halloween by Area: Denver Metro and Boulder County

The metro is wide, and "near me" means something different in Longmont than it does in Five Points. The local read by area:

• Halloween events in Lafayette, CO, from pumpkin patches to the main event.
• Halloween party near Boulder, and the honest drive time.
• Halloween party near Longmont, the north-county rundown.
• Halloween party in north Denver and how the options compare.
• Halloween events near me, the whole metro sorted by proximity.
• Haunted houses in Denver, the scares in detail.
• Costume contests in Denver, where the cash prizes actually are.