Most towns put a few pumpkins out. Ours puts a woman in a coffin on wheels and pushes her 195 yards up the main street while thousands of people scream. The 32nd Emma Crawford Coffin Races run down Manitou Avenue on Saturday, October 24, 2026 — free to watch, per the official event page — and it is the single strangest, most genuinely local thing that happens in this region all year.
It's also only one piece of the October calendar. Down in Manitou you get a month of skeletons; up the pass, the two mountain towns we actually live between do Halloween in a way that looks nothing like a city version of it. Here's the whole thing, in the order we'd hand it to a guest.
Why a town races coffins
The short version of the story Manitou tells: Emma Crawford came to the springs in the 1880s hoping the mountain air would cure her tuberculosis. It didn't. She died at twenty-eight, and her wish was to be buried at the top of Red Mountain — so a dozen men hauled the coffin up by hand. Decades later, after enough rain and erosion, the mountain gave her back. The coffin came down the slope in pieces.
The town decided the only reasonable response was an annual footrace. Each team fields one "Emma" riding in a coffin of their own construction plus four costumed runners pushing it, with trophies for speed alongside awards for Best Coffin, Best Emma, and Best Entourage. The costume categories are where the real competition lives.
Race day, hour by hour
The published 2026 schedule is straightforward: the fan zone opens at 10 a.m. in the 700 block, the hearse-and-costume parade steps off at noon, and the races follow at roughly 1–2 p.m. in the 900 block of Manitou Avenue. Admission is free. If you want a spot on the rail rather than a view of the back of someone's head, be standing on the avenue by 11.
Getting there is the part people underestimate. Manitou is a narrow canyon town with limited parking on an ordinary Tuesday, and race day closes the street entirely. In 2025 the organizers ran free parking at the DMV structure at 1675 Garden of the Gods Road with a continuous shuttle down to Hiawatha Gardens — $5 round trip, twelve and under free — and closed the avenue from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. We'd expect something similar this year, but check the festival's getting-there page in the week before rather than assuming last year's details carry over.
Local tip: Coming down from Woodland Park or Florissant, you don't need the shuttle lot at all — it exists for the Colorado Springs crowd stacking up eastbound on US-24. Take Ute Pass down, exit at the first Manitou exit instead of following traffic to the main one, and park uphill on a residential street west of the closure. You arrive behind the congestion instead of in it, and you're pointed the right way when you leave. Bring layers either way: the canyon holds shade, and a 60-degree afternoon feels like 45 once you've stood in a crowd for two hours.
All of October, not just the one Saturday
If you can't make the 24th, Manitou stretches the season across the whole month. Skeleton Craze fills storefront windows along the avenue with elaborate skeleton tableaux for all of October — the kickoff to the region's Arts Month — and visitors vote for the best one. In recent years ballots have been available at the Visit Manitou Springs office at 354 Manitou Avenue from October 1, with winners announced just before Halloween; the Skeleton Craze page posts the current year's rules. It's free, it takes about forty minutes of walking, and it's the better version of this town for anyone traveling with kids who'd find the race crowd overwhelming.
Ghost tours also run weekends through October, and they fill up for the last two weekends of the month. Reserve before you drive down, not when you get there.
Up the pass: the mountain-town versions
This is the part visitors miss, and it's the part we like better.
- Woodland Park's Hallow-Palooza. The city runs a small cluster of events in the days before Halloween — Trick-or-Treat at Memorial Park, a Costume Cornhole night for adults at the Ute Pass Cultural Center, and a Pumpkin Dive at the Woodland Aquatic Center where kids fish floating pumpkins out of the pool. As of this writing the city hasn't posted 2026 dates; they typically land in the week or two before Halloween on the Hallow-Palooza page. Worth a check about a week out.
- Cripple Creek's Trunk or Treat, October 31. The city's 2026 event calendar lists it for Halloween night, without times attached yet. A gold-rush town at 9,500 feet on Halloween, with Bennett Avenue's Victorian storefronts behind the candy tables, beats any pumpkin patch we've been to — just note that the calendar carries a standing "subject to change" line, so confirm before you commit the evening.
- Dark skies, free. Florissant Fossil Beds has been a certified International Dark Sky Park since 2021, and late October delivers long, cold, unusually steady nights. Even with no ranger program on the schedule, pulling off in the valley on the drive home from Cripple Creek is the thing guests email us about afterward.
What else the last week of October gets you
Aspen season is finished by then — our fall color guide covers why mid-to-late September is the window — but the trade is a real one. The trails are empty, Mueller State Park has parking spaces at 10 a.m., and rates up here haven't climbed into the holiday season yet.
The honest warning: this is when the weather stops being reliable. We have had 70 degrees and sun on Halloween, and we have had six inches on the ground with US-24 down to one clear lane. Pack for both. The pass gets plowed early and well, but if snow is in the forecast, leave an extra half hour and don't build a tight schedule around a drive.
Where we'd put you
For a weekend built around the coffin races, stay on the Woodland Park side and keep the pass drive short. The Coyote A-Frame and Spruce Cabin both sit about twenty minutes above Manitou, with restaurants and a real grocery store minutes away — which matters when a mountain October reroutes your plans. Come down for the parade, be back for dinner.
If you're bringing a group, or building the weekend around Cripple Creek's Halloween night instead, we'd send you to the Florissant side. Highland House sleeps eleven and is our usual answer when two families travel together, and Manitou is about thirty-five minutes out the door. And for anyone who intends to be outside after dark — which, in late October at this elevation, is most of the point — the Kingston Stargazing Cabin sits in exactly the dark-sky country the Fossil Beds got certified for.
One scheduling note: coffin-race weekend has stopped being a local secret. It fills the valley's lodging first and pushes people up the pass second, so the last two weekends of October now book earlier up here than they did three years ago. If it's on your list, put it on the calendar before the leaves finish dropping.
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