Spooktober was a Halloween festival that ran in Melbourne through the 2010s, most visibly at St Kilda Town Hall. This page sets out what can be pieced together about its history from event listings, local press and archived festival pages. Spooky October Melbourne is an independent editorial project, not the festival's organiser, and we have no connection to Spooktober, its organisers, or any event trading under a similar name today. We do not sell tickets, and nothing here should be read as a current event listing.
Origins and early years
Accounts of Spooktober's beginnings point to Dale Pope, who is described as having started with Halloween-themed parties for her own sons that grew popular enough to expand into a public event, with the children's entertainment brand Wizz Fizz supporting the festival from its first year. Different listings disagree on exact founding dates and on how many editions had run by a given year, with one article referring to a "fourth year" and another to a "fifth year" for events held close together, so we are treating the early timeline as approximate rather than settled. What is clearer is that before the festival took its later St Kilda Town Hall form, a related haunted house called The Asylum ran for three nights in 2015 at Ormond Hall on St Kilda Road, built around a horror theme involving a fictional, abandoned psychiatric institution, with standard tickets reported at around twenty five dollars and a discounted rate for students.
The St Kilda Town Hall years
By 2016, the festival had settled into St Kilda Town Hall, running across four days in late October with grounds entry free and the haunted house experiences ticketed separately. A 2016 program description places the Asylum attraction at the Town Hall that year, reframed as a horror walkthrough built around "abandoned halls of a mental asylum". Coverage from 2017 describes a similarly structured four-day event, running from Friday 27 to Tuesday 31 October, again with free entry to the grounds and paid entry to the haunted attractions themselves. Press describing the festival around this period called it Melbourne's largest Halloween event, built to cover a range of ages and scare levels rather than a single intense format, with family-oriented daytime sessions and a more adult-oriented evening program.
The haunted attractions
Over its run, the festival's haunted house line-up included Phobia and The Coven, described in one article as two haunted houses, alongside a separate escape-room style experience called Escape the Swamp, built for small groups of up to six people. Earlier and later editions of the festival's own site also referenced other named attractions, including Blood Manor, The Doll Factory and Trick or Treat Manor, pointing to a rotating set of themed houses rather than one fixed experience repeated every year. Alongside the haunted houses, the grounds carried the kind of supporting program typical of a festival of this size: food vendors, a themed bar, a stage for music and performers, and roaming costumed actors, all of which this site covers in more detail elsewhere.
The move to Luna Park and the end of the festival
Reporting from 2019 describes Spooktober, by then still associated with St Kilda Town Hall, merging with a separate Halloween event called Luna Dark to form a combined Spooktober at Luna Park. That move placed the festival inside an existing, long-running amusement park rather than a standalone town hall event, changing its format considerably from the earlier years. We have not found reliable, up-to-date coverage confirming whether the festival, under either name, is still running in its original form, and listings for Spooktober-branded events have become harder to verify in more recent years. If you are looking for a Halloween event to attend this year, we would treat any page or listing referencing the original Spooktober branding with some caution and confirm directly with a venue before buying tickets.
Related reading
For more on the district where most of this history took place, see Halloween in St Kilda. The Halloween festival guide covers the elements of a typical festival program in more general terms, and the Spooktober Asylum page goes into more depth on that specific attraction's history from Ormond Hall through to its later Town Hall appearances. The home page explains more about what this independent guide covers and how it relates, or rather does not relate, to the former festival.