I just got back from a three day trip to Disneyland to check out all of their fun Disneyland Halloween Time food and festivities for 2022. It was so much fun but exhausting because there’s so much to do and see! I’ve put together this Disneyland Halloween 2022 guide to give you an overview of all the Halloween fun that can be had at Disneyland this time of year! If I missed anything and you have questions, feel free to comment on this post and I’ll get you an answer!
What is Disneyland Halloween Time?
Before I get into the details, I thought I’d provide some basic details and answers to questions I know are going to come up! Disneyland Halloween Time is the most spooktacular time of year at Disneyland Resort! It starts September 2nd and runs through Halloween on October 31st. It’s full of frighteningly fun food, fall decorations, Halloween celebrations, and seasonal ride overlays. It’s more treats than tricks and definitely worth a visit to check out both Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure Park, the Downtown Disney District, and all the hotels! You can get great deals on tickets from my favorite Disneyland ticket partner Get Away Today! Right now they have a great deal going on for tickets! Okay so let’s really get started now and talk about all of the fun Halloween activities going on in Disneyland Resort during the Halloween season!
Disneyland Halloween Party: oogie Boogie Bash
Oogie Boogie Bash is the Disney Halloween Party that’s held on select nights during the season at Disney’s California Adventure Park. It’s a special ticketed event (tickets are currently sold out) and the best place to meet villains, collect tons of treats, and see the only parade currently going on at Disneyland! I wrote up an entire post about Oogie Boogie Bash here so I won’t rehash all of the details in this post here! There are fun decorations on Buena Vista Street, immersive trick or treat trails, a Halloween parade, and more!
Characters in Halloween Costumes
Halloween is one of the only times to see characters dressed up in costume at Disneyland! And they don’t just wear one costume – during our visit I saw characters in all sorts of different costumes! And because it’s Disneyland, often times you’ll just see characters wandering around interacting with guests. We caught Chip and Dale in their cute skeleton costumes just hanging out with people taking pictures. It’s one of the reasons I love Disneyland so much!
Halloween Photo Opps
Throughout both the parks, there are fun Halloween specific photo opps to take advantage of! Some of them you can just use your phone (like with the great big Mickey Mouse pumpkin). If you want a Giant Mickey pumpkin photo and don’t want to wait in line, grab one from the other side or just from the side. There was a huge line for the PhotoPass photographers, but none on the opposite side (there were shadows). Other photos that include a little magic will require having a PhotoPass! They’re $20 for the day and can be shared across the family, totally worth it to do for a day or two to get all the magical Halloween shots! Or if you get Genie+, you get PhotoPass for free!
Disneyland Halloween Treats
There are about a gazillion different Disneyland Halloween treats you can try, and I tried all of them! And wrote reviews on all of them. This Disneyland Halloween treats post is long, but it has all of the information you could ever need about what to eat during Disneyland Halloween time! Here are just a few pictures of some of my favorites!
Disneyland Halloween Decorations
Both Disneyland Park and Disney’s California Adventure Park are all decked out for the Halloween season! As soon as you walk in the front gates, you’ll know you’re in for a treat! Not all parts of the parts are decorated so make sure to keep an eye out for these main highlights! Main Street Pumpkin Festival – tons of pumpkins line Main Street, U.S.A. plus lots of lights and other festive decorations! Halloween Tree – this tree decorated for Halloween can be found right outside of the Golden Horseshoe Saloon in Frontierland. It’s a fun tradition that’s been going on for a long time and a fun one to spot in the middle of an otherwise undecorated portion of the park! Frontierland is decorated for Día de los Muertos just across the way from the Golden Horseshoe and the colorful decorations are totally worth checking out! It includes Coco decorations as well as Encanto! This is just one of the places you’ll see things themed for the spirit of dia de los muertos, so keep your eyes peeled! Cars Land Haul-O-Ween – Radiator Springs gets a full makeover for Halloween Time with lights, costumes, and decorations everywhere you look! I shared lots of photos in this Disneyland Halloween party post if you want to see details! Make sure not to miss the photo opps with the Haul-O-Ween cars too! Edible Oogie Boogie – make sure to hop into the Grand Californian Hotel to see the edible Oogie Boogie at the front of the lobby. I actually had fun going in every day to see what had been done in the past 24 hours! Downtown Disney District – Downtown Disney wasn’t decorated yet for the year but last year it was decked out with all sorts of pumpkins! One of my favorites is this mural just across from Earl of Sandwich by the entrance to Downtown Disney! Also, make sure to not miss Pluto’s Pumpkin Pursuit – more details on that shortly!
Halloween Rides at Disneyland
There are four different Halloween overlays at Disneyland for Halloween Time – two of them are don’t miss attractions and the other two are fun if you want to ride those rides anyway. But regardless, I love that there are even Halloween-themed attractions!
Haunted Mansion Holiday
Haunted Mansion Holiday is the only Halloween ride in Disneyland Park and is Haunted Mansion completely transformed into a Nightmare Before Christmas version of the ride. It’s so well done and a can’t miss. If you like Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, you’re going to love this. Honestly it’s hard to go back to the regular haunted mansion after.
Guardians of the Galaxy: Monsters After Dark
This is another complete transformation of a ride. Same concept as the regular Guardians of the Galaxy ride (one of my favorites) but the preview movie, storyline, and actual ride music and scenes are totally different. The nice thing about Monsters After Dark is that it doesn’t completely take away the regular Guardians of the Galaxy Ride (which is one of my favorites), instead the ride switches over starting at 3PM every day. I recommend doing both! One thing to note is that Monsters After Dark is definitely more scary from a theming standpoint than the regular Guardians ride. The actual drop sequences are in the dark and includes some not so scary but still could be frightening for little one monsters – although I think the scarier part is just being in the dark! I thought it was still fun, but definitely something to know if you’re planning to take younger kids! For Lightning Lane passes, these are actually treated as two separate rides so you can do Guardians once and Monsters After Dark once as separate rides!
Luigi’s Honkin’ Haul-O-Ween and Mater’s Graveyard JamBOOree
These are both basically just the same rides as they are normally but with more festive Halloween music and decorations! They’re worth riding if you have time but not much different than the regular rides!
Plaza de La Familia
At the park of Disney’s California Adventure near Paradise Grill is a huge setup celebrating the spirit of Día de los Muertos and Coco! This is a great place to do a fun little craft and enjoy the musical celebration of Coco! There’s plenty of color, fun, and food to be enjoyed including a couple of exclusive photo opps, a free craft, and a place to write down and hang up family memories! Plus, there’s a band playing festive music throughout the day at the Paradise Gardens stage!
Disneyland Halloween Fireworks and Shows
While Disneyland doesn’t have all of their entertainment back, there were definitely a few things I found entertaining to watch (other than people)! The Dapper Dans were back singing Halloween tunes, a Mariachi band was playing near Paradise Garden Grill, the Disneyland Band was playing in Tomorrowland, and so on. You can see the full entertainment schedule here! One of my personal favorites was the band in Carthay Circle, they just looked like they were having a great time! Instead of parades, they are still doing character cavalcades like the Incredibles that were zooming down Pixar Pier! There is also a scheduled one each day check the Disneyland app where you can see Mickey and Minnie in their Halloween costumes in Disneyland! Plus, Disneyland also has a Halloween fireworks show called Halloween Screams at 9PM every night. Honestly, it was the one time that I felt overcrowded at Disneyland so we skipped it, but here’s a picture from the Disneyland website to show you an example of what the show is!
Disneyland Halloween Merchandise
Of course there’s an entire line of new merchandise just for celebrating Disneyland Halloween! With so many items to choose from, it’s pretty hard to know where to start! Simple ideas are cute Halloween ears, a Halloween balloon, or even just a fun collectible Halloween glass or popcorn bucket! You can also get a lot of the same merchandise directly from ShopDisney! They have a huge Halloween collection that’s full of a lot of the merch from the parks as well as exclusive ShopDisney items! I totally ordered myself a Mickey Mouse Jack-O-Lantern Candy Bowl and this Halloween spirit jersey because they wouldn’t fit in my suitcase home! There are always food themed merchandise available as well like this Mickey mummy popcorn bucket, an Oogie Boogie tumbler, and more! I always think they’re super cute but never have room to bring them home unfortunately!
Pluto’s Pumpkin Pursuit
Okay since we’re talking about merchandise, this is my favorite secret to getting a Halloween souvenir for a discount WITH a free activity included! I wasn’t able to do this year’s scavenger hunt but you can get a general idea of what it is with my information below from the 2021 Pumpkin pursuit! I double-checked and it’s pretty much the same as last year! At Downtown Disney, you can do a pumpkin scavenger hunt called Pluto’s Pumpkin Pursuit. Head into World of Disney (or look at many of the other kiosks) and buy a scavenger hunt card (aka game board) for $9.99. It comes with a little double-sided card. One side has the pumpkin locations and the other side has the pumpkin stickers. Then head out into Downtown Disney to find where all of the pumpkins are hidden! The hunt starts at the fountains by La Brea Bakery and ends all the way at the other end of Downtown Disney by the Star Wars Trading Post! Put your stickers on the back and turn the card in for your choice of one of four Halloween tumblers that typically cost $14! So you save $4 on the tumbler and get a fun activity while you’re at it! Or if you don’t even want to do the hunt – you can still get your tumbler! Grab it before you leave World of Disney if you want! I did this on my own but know my boys would have loved it – they love any Halloween scavenger hunt! And it was definitely an inexpensive souvenir, one that I’ll actually use at home all the time! If you just want the tumblers, you can’t buy them directly but can buy a pumpkin scavenger hunt and turn them in for the tumblers (I asked!).
Disneyland Halloween Tips
Okay so these are some tips that didn’t necessarily fit into any of the other categories above that I thought would be helpful!
Be at the parks for rope drop or within a few minutes after rope drop to enjoy the shortest lines and fewest crowds. Because of the new Magic Key program, we saw a lot of additional people in the parks after school hours and in the evenings. Do Disneyland Park on days of the Oogie Boogie Bash if you don’t have a party ticket. Disney California Adventure closes at 6PM on those days so you don’t want your DCA day cut short by the party! Skip the fireworks if you’re worried about crowds. That way by far the most crowded I saw the parks at all. People were lined up for hours beforehand and the entire Main Street U.S.A. was full. Otherwise, there were very few times I felt overcrowded during our visit. Head to Haunted Mansion first thing after rope drop if you don’t have Genie+. It had the longest line of any ride throughout trip and unless you want to wait for 30-45 minutes to ride, rope drop is going to be your best bet! Avoid weekends if possible. We went mostly on weekdays but Friday afternoon/evening you could tell that the Magic Key (annual pass) crowd was coming in. I can only imagine what the weekends would feel like. Grab a locker to hold extra things like costumes, treats, souvenirs, and extra closing layers. It’s only $7 for a small (one backpack) locker and $10 for a two backpack sized large locker all day. We used one for two of the days we were there and it was SO nice to not have to carry about all of the extras. Lockers in DCA are located right near Market House at the front of the park and lockers in Disneyland are on the right about halfway down Main Street U.S.A., tucked into a back corner. Mobile order your food if possible. This is always a great Disneyland tip but I found it really helpful this past week, especially since a lot of the seasonal items were available via mobile order! If you’re going in early September, prepare for the heat. Halloween costumes and outfits can be cute, but you’ll be miserable if it’s 90 degrees and you’re wearing a Halloween sweater!
More Disneyland Tips
If you’re headed to Disneyland, make sure to read these tips before you go!
Disney packing list – everything you need to pack for your next trip! Disneyland food – if you want to try out the best of the best Disneyland food, make sure to read this first! Disneyland food and wine festival – everything you need to know about Disneyland’s food and wine! Disneyland Halloween food – the ultimate guide to all the Halloween treats and eats at Disneyland!Oogie Boogie Bash – tips and tricks for enjoying Oogie Boogie Bash!
