Plenty of towns can put up cobwebs in October. Westfield has the considerably stranger advantage of being able to point to one of its own residents and say that some of the country’s most durable macabre humor grew up here.
AddamsFest returns to Westfield this October for its ninth consecutive year, turning the Union County town into a month-long celebration of Charles Addams, the cartoonist born in 1912 and raised in Westfield whose work for The New Yorker eventually produced the characters that became The Addams Family. The official AddamsFest announcement, released September 9, frames the festival around Addams’ life, artwork and ‘penchant for the macabre,’ but the appeal is broader than a standard hometown tribute. Westfield is not simply attaching a famous name to a fall festival. It is using streets, storefronts, parks and even a cemetery to reconnect the work to the place that helped shape it.
That connection is what keeps AddamsFest from feeling like generic Halloween programming. The Addams Family has been reinterpreted repeatedly, from the original cartoons to television, live-action movies, Broadway, animation and Netflix’s Wednesday, and each generation tends to find its own doorway into the family. Westfield gets to step behind all of those versions and return to the source: the town where Addams went to school, wandered downtown and, according to the festival, spent some of his free time in the community’s oldest cemetery. The joke becomes geography.
The town is leaning into that geography throughout October. The Addams Family house will again float on Mindowaskin Pond, a Halloween counterpart to Westfield’s December tradition of placing a replica of the Presbyterian Church on the water. Downtown storefronts will become the Wicked Windows of Westfield, painted by community artists, while residents will compete in the Haunt Your House contest with separate daytime and nighttime categories. Community voting for the decorated homes is scheduled to run from October 11 through October 30, supported by an online map that turns the town itself into part of the attraction.
There will also be Addams-inspired murals at the Central Avenue underpass and a ‘Be Witched’ selfie stop near the Rialto Center for Creativity. None of those elements requires a ticket or a single destination. They work more like environmental cues: reminders that the festival is intended to spill into ordinary movement through town rather than remain confined to one event site.
The centerpiece for people interested in Addams as an artist is this year’s AddamsFest Americana exhibit, running Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from October 9 through October 25 at the Rialto Center for Creativity. Tied to the America250 commemoration, the exhibit will look at the American experience through an Addams-inspired lens, combining original Charles Addams works on loan from the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation with pieces by local artists. It is a fitting framework for a cartoonist whose humor often depended on making the familiar slightly wrong: houses, families, neighborhoods and social rituals that looked ordinary until one detail revealed that everyone inside was operating by a different set of rules.
The festival also offers several ways to follow Addams through Westfield rather than simply look at his work. Lantern Burial Ground Tours are scheduled for October 10, 11 and 17 at the Presbyterian Church in Westfield, with tours departing in ten-minute intervals from 4:30 to 6 p.m. The festival notes that the young Addams spent time in the historic cemetery. No advance registration is required for the lantern tours; they are first come, first served, with a suggested donation.
The Charles Addams Heritage Trail Tour goes wider. Scheduled for October 10, 17 and 24 at 11 a.m., the guided walk retraces Addams’ route through the Westfield of the 1920s, including his home, school, downtown and the cemetery. Advance tickets are required and are scheduled to go on sale September 23. This is the part of AddamsFest that most clearly turns biography into local history. A place that might otherwise pass as an ordinary stop on a walk becomes meaningful because someone later transformed what he saw there into a visual vocabulary recognized around the world.
On October 18, the Westfield Memorial Library will host Charles Addams: Family and Friends at 2 p.m., featuring H. Kevin Miserocchi, a trustee of the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation, discussing Addams’ art and life. Advance registration is required through the library. For a festival filled with deliberately theatrical imagery, that kind of program matters because it keeps the creator from disappearing behind the franchise he created. The Addams Family became enormous; Addams himself remains the reason Westfield can claim the story as local.
The bigger crowd events arrive in the middle of the month. Charlie’s Ale Garden returns to the Westfield Armory on October 17 from 6 to 11 p.m., with local bands, headliner Fresh Kids of Bel-Air, beer and wine, and food trucks. Tickets are scheduled to go on sale September 16 for Westfield residents and September 27 for the general public. The following day brings Addams Family Fun Day to downtown Westfield. The current festival schedule lists the event for 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Quimby Street, with character appearances, pumpkin decorating, music, entertainment and activities with local merchants. No tickets or registration are required.
For anyone whose Addams Family lives most vividly in live action, October 23 is the especially easy date to circle. The town will screen the 1991 The Addams Family outdoors at Foundation Park at 7:30 p.m., with a rain date of October 24. The screening is free, although advance reservations are required and are scheduled to become available September 30. It is difficult to come up with a more seasonally appropriate way to revisit that version of the family than outdoors, in October, in the town where Charles Addams grew up.
Wednesday gets her own piece of the calendar as well. The Wednesday Night Crawlers returns October 28 from 6 to 10 p.m., sending participants through participating downtown businesses for seasonal cocktails and Addams-themed surprises. No ticket is required. A separate Wednesday’s Finds program will run through the month, with downtown businesses offering themed specials, products, treats, giveaways and other surprises on Wednesdays.
This year the festival is also deliberately widening its perimeter through a new Friends of AddamsFest program, which brings independently produced community events into the month-long celebration. The initial list includes a Masquerade Ball at the James Ward Mansion on October 2, Wednesday Addams’ Creepy Garden Kids Storytime at the Westfield Memorial Library on October 14, Addams Family cookie decorating through Westfield Recreation on October 23, the Jack O’Lantern Trail at Brightwood Park on October 24, and a Halloween Family Fun & Parade organized by the Westfield Police Department and the Optimist Club of Westfield on October 25. More partner events are expected to be announced.
There is an obvious tourism function to all of this. A month of programming gives people repeated reasons to come downtown, visit restaurants and shops, attend ticketed events and return for things they missed. But AddamsFest works because the commercial layer is attached to something Westfield can legitimately claim. The town is not pretending to be the setting of somebody else’s story for a weekend. Charles Addams was born and raised there, and the festival can point visitors toward the environment that surrounded him before the characters became television icons, movie stars, musical theater properties or streaming hits.
That is also why the annual transformation feels more like civic memory than franchise fandom. Westfield has taken a local biography and built rituals around it: paint the windows, float the house, walk the old route, visit the cemetery, look at the art, watch the movie, make downtown a little stranger for a month. A festival that began as a celebration of a famous hometown artist has become part of the town’s own seasonal identity. And that is probably the most Addams-like thing about it.
Westfield does not need to become someplace else for Halloween. It just has to remember who grew up there.
SOURCE NOTES
• Official AddamsFest 2026 announcement, Sept. 9, 2026
• Official 2026 AddamsFest schedule
• Town of Westfield municipal update previewing the ninth annual festival
Event details and ticket availability can change; dates and times above reflect official information available Sept. 10, 2026.