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
2023 Dates & Hours: October 15, 11am – 5pm.
Heritage Square Museum has rebranded its Halloween & Mourning Tours as Victorian Mourning Faire. Additional Halloween-themed events are scheduled in October:
- Saturday October 7: Edgar Allen Poe Storytelling Event
- Friday October 13: Ghost Tours
For the Christmas season, there will be two performances of Victorian Ghost Stories on December 2 and 9.
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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.
