Every October, storefronts along Lockwood Avenue and Big Bend Boulevard start taping up small paper posters with an orange pumpkin on them. That poster is the entire announcement for one of Webster Groves' two Halloween traditions: a scheduled, sponsored, printed-in-advance trick-or-treat circuit that runs through the Old Webster and Old Orchard business districts. A few blocks away, on residential streets like Bompart Avenue, a second Halloween tradition runs at the same time of year with no poster, no sponsor, and no fixed date. It has been passed store to store, porch to porch, for decades, and it has nothing to do with candy.
Most write-ups about Halloween in a St. Louis suburb treat it as one event. Webster Groves runs two, and they rarely intersect.
The Circuit With a Poster
The organized version is straightforward. Member businesses of the Old Webster Trade Association, along with shops in the Old Orchard business district, hand out treats to costumed kids on a Saturday afternoon in the lead-up to Halloween. Families move store to store rather than door to door, checking storefront windows for the pumpkin poster that marks a participating business. It is a retail event as much as a kids' event: it pulls foot traffic into both commercial strips on the same afternoon, and it has run long enough that the city's own events calendar lists it as a recurring fixture rather than a one-off.
One quirk worth knowing before you circle a date: Halloween itself falls on a Saturday in 2026. In years when October 31 lands midweek, the business trick-or-treat and the evening of actual trick-or-treating are two separate outings on two separate days. This year, with Halloween on a Saturday, the two could line up or the business event could still run its own separate afternoon slot, so it is worth checking the city calendar directly rather than assuming a specific date. The mechanism matters more than the exact day: this is a daylight, storefront-to-storefront event distinct from evening trick-or-treating at homes.
The event spans two business districts that sit close enough to walk between but far enough apart that most families pick one and stay there. Old Orchard, clustered around Big Bend and Lockwood, has the newer restaurant energy. Old Webster, along Gore Avenue, carries the older commercial core. The trick-or-treat poster is one of the few traditions that treats them as a single afternoon rather than two separate stops.
What the Poster Doesn't Cover
None of that explains why Webster Groves has a reputation, well beyond the metro area, for taking Halloween seriously as a residential tradition rather than just a retail one. That reputation traces back to something the business districts have no part in: the town's own accumulated ghost stories, most of them tied to specific streets and specific buildings rather than to any organized event.
The Webster-Kirkwood Times reported that Patrick Dorsey, a Webster Groves resident, spent years collecting these stories for his book Haunted Webster Groves, drawing on interviews with people willing to talk about what they'd experienced in their own homes. He found reports clustered on a specific set of residential streets: Selma, Bompart, Glennon, Newport, Edgar, Tuxedo Park, and Atalanta among them. Dorsey has said that of everything he documented, Bompart Avenue came up more than any other street in his research.
What makes this different from generic small-town Halloween marketing is that it isn't marketing at all. Nobody hands out a poster for Bompart Avenue. The stories exist because residents told them to a neighbor writing a book, not because a trade association wanted foot traffic.
The Theater That Kept Its Cast
The most-repeated haunting in Webster Groves isn't in a house at all. It's at the Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts on Edgar Road, the venue that has hosted both the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis and Opera Theatre of St. Louis for decades as part of Webster University's fine arts programs. According to accounts collected by Dorsey and later repeated in student reporting from the campus paper, a master electrician who was working with students on a production in 1982 lay down for a short rest near the light board and never woke up. The story that has circulated since is that he never fully left the building. Staff and students over the years have described feeling caught or steadied on the catwalk above the stage, as though something kept them from a fall.
Whether or not you put stock in it, the story tells you something concrete about the town: even its ghost lore runs through the same institution that gives Webster Groves its identity as an arts town. The Loretto-Hilton isn't a spooky old house on the edge of the city. It's a working theater that has been staging professional productions for half a century, and the haunting attached to it is inseparable from that history rather than bolted onto it for October.
Two Traditions That Never Share a Calendar
Put the two Halloweens side by side and the difference is the point. The business district trick-or-treat is scheduled, sponsored, and advertised with a printed poster you can photograph and check off. It exists because a trade association decided it should exist, and it changes very little year to year beyond the date.
The ghost story tradition has no such structure. It moved from resident to resident long before anyone wrote it down, attached itself to particular streets rather than an entire zip code, and centers on a theater that would have its own history and reputation with or without a single ghost story attached to it. Nobody schedules Bompart Avenue's reputation. Nobody needs to.
Living in Webster Groves for any length of time means eventually knowing both versions without confusing them. Newer residents tend to find the storefront circuit first, because it's the one with a flyer. The other Halloween, the one that runs through specific streets and a specific theater, usually gets passed along by a neighbor rather than a calendar listing. That's a fair description of how most of the town's older traditions work here: the ones with posters are easy to find, and the ones without them are usually the ones worth asking a neighbor about.
If you want a closer look at what else is happening in the same two business districts this season, from restaurant turnover to who's renting versus buying storefronts, the neighborhood page for Webster Groves has more, and a companion piece on how Old Orchard and Old Webster are each changing covers the storefronts themselves in more detail.
If you've lived on one of the streets with a reputation, or you're curious what your own block's version of the story is, Maureen Onder has been hearing these stories from clients and neighbors for a long time and always has time for one more.
