The Halloween Lover’s Guide to Summer

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Summer arrives every year with the same aggressive cheerfulness. Sunshine. Swimsuits. An expectation that you will be delighted by all of it.

And you — a person who owns more black clothing than is strictly advisable for the season — are expected to simply go along with it. To smile at the neon beach towels. To pretend that humidity is fun. To act as though October isn't still four months away.

Here's the thing: summer has its own darkness. It always has.

The nights are warm enough to actually be outside in them. The old stories about this season — the folklore, the ghost lights over the marshes, the Midsummer magic that predates recorded history — are just as rich as anything autumn has to offer. You've just been told to ignore them in favor of sunscreen.

Don't.

Welcome, again, to Summerween. The season is yours if you want it.

Get Outside

Summer outdoors doesn't have to mean beaches and barbecues. The same landscape that everyone else is using for volleyball has a completely different character after dark — or in the early morning, or on a stormy afternoon. Find the version of it that's yours.

Cemetery Walks (The Summer Edition)

Summer cemeteries are genuinely different from their spring and autumn counterparts, and underrated for it. The old trees are in full shade, which means even a midday visit stays cool. Wildflowers grow thick in the older, less-maintained sections. The light in late afternoon filters through the canopy in long gold columns that make the whole place feel like something out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

If you live somewhere with fireflies, a cemetery at dusk in June or July is one of the most quietly magical things you can experience. Bring a blanket. Stay longer than you planned.

Night Hikes and Stargazing Trails

This is summer's secret weapon. The nights are warm enough to actually be comfortable outdoors after dark, which opens up a category of experience that's unavailable most of the year. Many state parks offer ranger-led night hikes; others have designated stargazing areas that are gorgeous and slightly eerie in the dark.

Look for trails near water — lakes, rivers, wetlands — where the atmosphere thickens after sunset and the sounds change completely.

Bonus: bioluminescent bays, if you're near a coast that has them, are one of the stranger and more beautiful things the natural world does, and they are firmly in the "spooky in the best way" category.

Swamps, Bogs, and Bayous

Autumn gets the foggy forests. Summer gets the swamps, and honestly it's the better deal. There's a reason so much folklore — will-o'-the-wisps, marsh lights, the whole canon of Southern Gothic — is set in summer wetlands. They're genuinely uncanny environments: still, hot, dense with life and noise and the sense that something is just out of sight.

Guided kayak tours through cypress swamps, boardwalk trails through bogs, even a quiet afternoon by a brackish estuary — all of it hits differently than a regular nature walk. Look for tours that specifically lean into the local folklore. They exist, and they're wonderful.

*The perfect oddity museum: Tom Devlin’s Monster Museum in Boulder City, NV.*

Visit Somewhere Spooky

Summer is peak travel season, which means more options — and, if you time it right, off-peak pricing at the destinations everyone else saves for October.

Ghost Tours in the Heat

The ghost tour industry doesn't sleep in summer. In fact, many historic destinations — New Orleans, Savannah, Charleston, Salem — are more atmospheric in summer than in autumn, when every tour is packed with Halloween tourists and everyone's heard the same punchlines.

July in New Orleans, on a humid night when the fog sits low over the river, is the real thing. Go then.

Roadside Americana and the Genuinely Weird

Summer was made for the road trip, and the American roadside is full of strange, dark, fascinating stops that never quite fit the "family vacation" category: oddity museums, haunted roadhouses, the ruins of old amusement parks, historic sites that tour guides tend to skip over.

Atlas Obscura is your best friend here. Plot a route around the weird stuff. It's a better trip. Looking for the best haunted watering holes? Check out Amanda Woomer’s book, America’s Haunted Breweries, Distilleries, and Wineries.

Folklore Festivals and Living History Sites

This is an underused one. Summer is festival season, which includes a surprising number of events centered on local ghost lore, folk magic traditions, and dark history. Here in Minnesota, I’m dying to get myself to the American Swedish Institute’s Midsommar Celebration.

Living history sites — colonial villages, frontier forts, plantation museums doing serious interpretive work — often have their most robust programming in summer. The history is real. The atmosphere, in an old building on a hot afternoon, is legitimately unsettling.

Host Something

The summer hosting instinct usually goes toward cookouts and pool parties. Nothing wrong with either. But there's a whole other lane available.

A Summerween Party

The aesthetic pivot from spring to summer Summerween is small but satisfying: trade the botanicals for something lusher, swap the fog-and-bare-branches palette for deep jewel tones and candlelight. A backyard party after dark, with string lights and good candles and a table that looks like nobody told it summer was "supposed to be bright," is exactly as fun as it sounds.

Splash of Spooky has a great list of ways you can celebrate the season.

An Outdoor Horror Movie Night

This is summer's version of the marathon night, and it is objectively better. A projector, a white sheet or a light-colored fence, and a warm night with blankets and snacks is one of the better ways to spend a summer evening in existence.

The genre choices shift slightly — summer horror has its own canon, from Jaws to Midsommar to The Wicker Man — and watching something genuinely unsettling while insects hum in the dark adds a layer that no living room can replicate.

The Midnight Picnic

A picnic doesn't have to happen at noon. A midnight picnic in a park, a cemetery, or a backyard — with a thermos of something warm, good cheese, fruit, whatever reads as slightly decadent — is a small act of reclamation. The night is out there. Use it.

Create Something

Summer gives you different raw materials than the other seasons. Use them.

Dark Florals and Summer Botanicals

Black-eyed Susans. Dark dahlias. Burgundy coneflowers. Chocolate cosmos, which are real, smell faintly of vanilla, and are one of the best plants in existence. Summer has its own gothic botanical palette, and it's worth pressing, drying, and working with.

Tend the Halloween Garden

If you started one in spring — check out the full garden series here — summer is where the real work happens. The moonflowers are climbing. The black dahlias are coming in. The bat-faced cuphea is doing something alarming and wonderful. Document it. It's going to be spectacular by October, and the process of getting there is its own pleasure.

Make Something for the Dark

Long summer evenings are genuinely good creative time: start the Halloween costume early (seriously, the people who aren't stressed in October started in July), make candles, work on whatever craft project you've been saving for "when I have time." The time is now. The light lasts forever. Use it.

Slow Down

Not everything is an activity. Sometimes Summerween is just a way of moving through a season that wasn't designed for you.

A Spooky Summer Reading List

Summer reading and horror are a natural pair — there's a reason Stephen King is synonymous with beach reads.

But summer gothic goes wider than King: “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia for lush and atmospheric, “The Troop” by Nick Cutter if you want to never eat again, “A Head Full of Ghosts” by Paul Tremblay for something that stays with you, or “In the Woods” by Tana French for a slow burn on a slow afternoon.

Find more picks here:

Build the Summerween Playlist

The spring playlist leaned into mist and bare branches. Summer calls for something different — warmer, slower, slightly swampier. Artists who live in that space between lush and uncanny. Songs for driving at night with the windows down.

Check out my latest Summerween playlist or give these a listen:

Halloween garage & surf rock playlist — Your Best Halloween Ever
Summerween Soirée — Halloween Queens

Find the Slowest, Oldest Place Near You

Every region has one: the oldest building in the county, the historic district nobody visits, the small-town museum staffed by one very dedicated volunteer who knows every story.

Summer tourism infrastructure makes these places easier to visit — more hours, more access — but the crowds don't go there. They're yours. Go slowly. Ask questions. The history is always stranger than the brochure.

The Dark Is Still There

Summer tries very hard to be uncomplicated. It isn't, of course. It never was.

The folklore knew this — Midsummer was never just a party, the long days were never just convenient, the strange light at the edge of the solstice meant something to every culture that lived under it. The heat and the abundance and the buzzing aliveness of it is beautiful, and it exists right next to something older and stranger and well worth paying attention to.

You don't have to spend the next three months waiting for the leaves to turn.

The dark is already out there. It's just wearing different clothes.