The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival Makes Halloween Special Again

As a child, Halloween was always the most magical time of the year. But I found that magic faded as I got older. Without Halloween-themed activities in elementary school, the Halloween event in Club Penguin, or the act of trick-or-treating to look forward to, October had grown devastatingly dull. As an adult, I find the only way to summon the Halloween spirit that came so innately to me as a child is to spend money—from decorations to costumes to every pumpkin-flavored item at Trader Joe’s, the spooky season now has a paywall. But booting up The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival imbues me with the magic of Halloween without having to spend any money at all—an experience which is nothing short of precious.

Despite communication limitations, The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is brimming with community. From the sheer amount of ghosts and player-carved pumpkins surrounding you at any given moment, the server always feels alive—whether you’re at the spawn point or the top of the climbing tower, other players have left their mark on the festival, meaning you never feel alone. On one server—they’re called universes in-game—once you solve all the puzzles in the haunted house and get to the final room, you’ll see someone carved a pumpkin to say “Congrats!” for your achievement. It made me cry a little.

During one session one player had summoned a UFO and carried a bunch of players up into the sky, while I watched in awe from the ground. The UFO pilot noticed me noticing them and lowered the UFO to the ground so that I, too, could get on board. We soared through the skies above the festival together, watching the thousands of player-carved pumpkins dotting the landscape glow from above. To express my gratitude and immense feeling of camaraderie to the other players on the UFO, I said, “I’m with my friends!”

Much like Spirit Halloween, The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival subsists on its own impermanence. Servers and moderation are incredibly expensive, and despite the game’s popularity—at the time of writing this, players have carved nearly 40,000 pumpkins—it’s unlikely Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is making any money. It would be deeply unsustainable for the developers to keep the game up and running year-round; Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival exists in spite of commercial game development, not because of it. 

The necessity of safe online spaces for all ages is fundamentally at odds with the nature of capitalism. Commercial free-to-play games rely on the predation of young people to make revenue because live service models are inherently unsustainable. So we desperately need more games like The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival, but we also desperately need the developers of these games to earn a living. Until we live under an economic system that enables artists to sustainably create public goods like The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival, we must directly support the artists doing this work ourselves. And we must embrace the art that moves us when and where it exists—including the seasonal treat of The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival. 

Bee Wertheimer is a games writer based in New York City. You can find them on Bluesky or visit their website beewertheimer.com.