When Halloween Grows Up

I imagine the first Halloween night in college feels different. You pass clusters of students covered in glitter and fake blood, music spilling from a random location, and for a moment, you can’t help but think of the years spent running through quiet neighborhoods with a pillowcase full of candy. 

Among college students, there’s an unspoken rule that once you enter college, the magic of Halloween fades. You start to wonder if that’s true—if the excitement you felt as a kid has worn off. The pumpkin-shaped buckets and DIY costumes are replaced with curated group themes and tacky special effects. Ask almost anyone, and they’ll say that college Halloween is just an excuse to party: recycled outfits, crowded basements, and blurry photos captioned “boo.”

And, sure, the party scene definitely exists. Group chats overflow with messages about who is getting ready where, which night will be “the big one,” and what everyone’s dressing up as. It’s the kind of routine everyone talks about: scrolling through Amazon for a last-minute costume, chatting with familiar faces in the Yard at midnight, and heading to Lamont the next morning pretending you don’t remember what happened last night.

But somewhere in the midst of all that chaos, there’s a quieter kind of Halloween, one that rarely makes it to Instagram stories. It may be less about parties and more about simplicity, lingering in the background. 

You see it in students gathered around a table outside the Science Center, arguing over which design is the most creative. Not long after, it’s roommates taking the commuter rail to Salem just to feel festive among tourists wearing crooked witch hats. And later still, it’s snapping photos with the ghost decorations in Annenberg. College may change Halloween, but it doesn’t kill the excitement of it. Even small things like that are reminders of how the holiday slips back into our lives each year.

There’s something strangely refreshing about how Halloween sneaks up every year. On a campus where cloudy weather and midterms can weigh everyone down, the holiday seems to bring people together. No one’s too busy to admire the scary spider in someone’s dorm window or compliment a professor’s spooky t-shirt. Those little exchanges add up.

In a place that often feels divided by p-sets, packed club schedules, and post-graduate career ambitions, small shared traditions like wearing matching costumes with your entire friend group can help students slow down from the constant pressure to be productive. These traditions remind students that it’s okay to have fun for no reason, and that connection doesn’t always have to come from pre-professional organizations and study breaks. 

Maybe growing up doesn’t make Halloween any less magical, you just celebrate it differently. As kids, it was about scoring a king-sized candy bar or watching “The Nightmare Before Christmas” in class. In college, it’s about finding small ways to make the ordinary—the walk back from section or the rush to grab dinner before the dining hall closes—feel special. It’s less about haunted houses or jump scares and more about the little things, laughing over matching Amazon wings or how much pumpkin- shaped Reese’s everyone’s consumed by Halloween weekend.

Here at Harvard, Halloween even has its own traditions. In dorms and Houses across campus, students share dorm “trick-or-treat” routes and ways to make your dorm spooky. Students this year can trick-or-treat Dean of Students Thomas Dunne’s house on Halloween night. Harvard University’s “In Focus” page reminds us of the “ghosts in Massachusetts Hall and the basement of Memorial Hall. And in previous years, the College Events Board has hosted Halloween-themed events with a photo tent, costume competition, and pumpkin-carving competition.

What ties Halloween weekend all together isn’t the costume or the parties. Instead, it’s that, for once, everyone’s celebrating together. For a weekend, it doesn’t matter if you’re a first-year or a senior, comping a club or running one. Halloween becomes a rare campus moment when stress takes a back seat and everyone just has fun. That’s why it matters so much. Because in a competitive environment like Harvard, it’s easy to get caught up in the next deadline or achievement, forgetting how to enjoy without proving anything. It’s a reminder that even here, where everyone’s chasing different paths, we’re still rooting for each other. 

That’s why Halloween still feels special in college. It may not be the same night of pillowcases and porch lights, but it’s still what we make of it. We get to choose how we celebrate. Some say college Halloween can feel performative, a weekend of costumes and photos rather than anything meaningful. But that misses the point. Sure, it’s different from what it used to be—but different doesn’t mean worse. In a way, it’s even more real now, because what makes it special isn’t solely the candy or costumes, but the people finding joy in the midst of the chaos of everyday life. 

This weekend, when campus fills with costumes, spooky decor hanging from dorm windows, and crowds heading to a dorm pregame, remember: Halloween doesn’t lose its magic when you grow up, it just finds new ways to bring people together. You see it in the music coming from open windows, the blur of people hopping between parties, and the walk back with friends at 2 a.m. when no one can feel their fingers, laughing about nothing and everything all at once. It’s simpler now, but it still feels good.

Hailey Kim ’29 (haileykim@college.harvard.edu) loves candy corn.