Heritage Square Museum Mourning Faire

Halloween History in a Living Musuem

Hollywood Gothique Says:

Heritage Square Museum does a wonderful job of exploiting the October season for history rather than horror. Its non-scary event takes visitors into the past, with recreations of Victorian funerals and seances and well-informed character-guides eager to explain the customs surrounding death and dying.

Heritage Square Museum
3800 Homer Street, Los Angeles, CA 90031
www.heritagesquare.org

2022 Dates & Hours: Saturday & Sunday October 23 & 24 from 11am-5pm.

Heritage Square Museum has rebranded its Halloween & Mourning Tours as Outdoor Mourning Faire. Additional Halloween-themed events are scheduled in September & October.

Additional Events:

September 24, 7:30-10pm: Haunted Ghost Tours with a Presentation of Victorian 19th Century Cinema. Guests take a Haunted Ghost Tour of Heritage Square’s 19th Century buildings, learning about ghost sightings and tragedies and listening to ghost stories along the pathways. Then there is a show of late 19th century and early 20th cinema, mainly from special effects pioneer, George Melies, whose short films include A Trip to the Moon and The Haunted Castle.
Sunday October 10 @7:30 pm: Spook-A-Nanny with Bob Baker Marionettes. Info & tickets available at www.bobbakermarionettetheater.com.
Wednesday October 27-Sunday October 31 Cemetery Lane. Information here.

Heritage Square Museum Halloween History

For many years, Heritage Square Museum invited visitor to attend their annual Halloween & Mourning Tours, usually presented on the final weekend of October. Guests explored the museum’s Victorian-era houses, where they found themselves immersed in the traditions of death and mourning as they were practiced 100 years ago, explained by costumed characters.

The Halloween & Mourning Tours were a living history program that put guests in the middle of a superstitious Victorian-era where death was never far behind. There were opportunities to witness a funeral procession, visit a fortune teller, learn about mourning attire, and even participate in a seance!

Heritage Square Museum also offered an annual Halloween and Mourning Movie Night in October, screening a classic horror film outdoors, and for a time, Heritage Square Museum hosted Safe Haven Trick-or-Treating on Halloween evening. Eventually this latter event was phased out in favor of presenting a more kid-friendly version of the Halloween and Mourning Tours on Sunday, when children from 2 to 12 could play period games, make 19th century harvest crafts, trick or treat, and listen to scary tales.

During the 2020 pandemic, Heritage Square Museum presented Oh, What a Beautiful Mourning, which was a scaled-down, outdoor version of its Halloween & Mourning Tour. 2021 resurrected the event, this time called Oh, What a Beautiful Mourning…Cults in Los Angeles. For 2022, the title was changed to Outdoor Mourning Faire.

Heritage Square Museum continues to host third-party events with spooky or supernatural themes, sometimes during Halloween and sometimes off-season. Notable examples include Cemetery Lane Trick or Treating, Heritage Scare, The Assassination of Edgar Allan Poe, and Witch!

Heritage Square is a year-round living history museum, focusing on Los Angeles during its first 100 years. Tours of the eight historic structures preserved at the location are given regularly throughout the year.