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Pennywise, Toy Story 5 and Willy Wonka characters, Jedis and a cast of Disney characters and other things that go bump in the night walked from vendor to vendor Friday evening for the annual Downtown Warsaw Spooktacular.
Main Street Warsaw Events Coordinator Nora Christiansen explained, “Spooktacular is a great event here in downtown Warsaw where it’s basically trick-or-treating in the streets. It’s an opportunity for a lot of businesses that maybe don’t have a storefront or are a little bit farther away to come downtown and let all these kids trick-or-treat.”
She said more than 50 vendors signed up to participate, but a few weren’t able to make it last minute. Along with those vendors, many of the downtown merchants also participated, providing an estimated 65 stops for kids to get candy and other treats for their bags and buckets.
Main Street Warsaw partners with the Warsaw Breakfast Optimist Club to provide the Halloween event that kids and families look forward to every year.
“We love our partners at the Optimist Club and that we’re able to put this on. They help us organize the prize table, which is huge. We do our costume contest with our secret judges in the crowd for the kids, and Optimists help us by donating to that effort,” Christiansen said.
The costume contest was broken up into age groups, from infant to adult. The age groups were infant, preschool, kids, tweens, teens, adults and groups, and each of the kids groups had six winning tickets while the teens and adults had three winning tickets.
“I love the group category. It’s my favorite when you see a mom and her three little dalmatians as Cruella de Vil, or something,” Christiansen stated.
Once a winner was handed their costume contest winning ticket from one of the secret judges, they were able to pick a prize from the judges table at the intersection of Center and Buffalo streets.
Christiansen said they anticipate to see 1,500 kids at the Spooktacular every year so the vendors can be prepared for that many.
“I think we are pretty close,” she said Friday. “The main thing is just we’re really lucky that we work with such great people, between the Optimist Club and all of our vendors and all of our downtown merchants to put on an event like this.”
The last “Third Friday” of 2026 will be on the first Friday in December, when the Twinkle Light Parade takes place Dec. 4 in downtown Warsaw.
“We will have Santa’s House here, again partnering with the Optimists. They bring the Santa House for us that night. We will have horse-drawn carriage rides. There will be a warming station Collier’s is going to donate and bring out this year so, hopefully, it won’t be as terrible as it has been in the past. And we will have the Twinkle Light Parade, which is my favorite part. I love a large lit-up parade,” she stated.
