For as long as most people have lived in Bellflower, Halloween meant one thing: Trick or Treat on the BOO!-levard, the Chamber of Commerce's annual candy crawl along Bellflower Boulevard between Flower and Oak Streets. This year, that assumption doesn't hold. A new festival called Howloween Haunted Harvest Fest is landing in Bellflower on September 26, and it isn't a rebrand or a relocation of the old event. It's a second one, and it opens the season more than five weeks before Halloween itself lands on October 31.
The new arrival is built around a detail the boulevard crawl never had: dogs. The event is billed as a free festival that's both family and pet friendly, with costumes for kids and their animals, pumpkins, treats, and the kind of open wandering through vendors and food that a stationary festival allows and a sidewalk crawl doesn't. It isn't trying to replace the BOO!-levard tradition. It's giving Bellflower a second, differently shaped night on the calendar well before the holiday itself arrives.
A Different Shape, Not a Rival
Where the BOO!-levard crawl asks people to walk between participating storefronts collecting candy, the new festival is framed as a single gathering: come in costume, bring the dog in its own costume, and move between vendors rather than door to door. That's a genuinely different kind of afternoon, and it's the first time in recent memory that Bellflower has had two Halloween-season gatherings built around two different kinds of participation instead of one event trying to cover both audiences.
The Boulevard Crawl Hasn't Gone Anywhere
The BOO!-levard event keeps its own format. Businesses along Bellflower Boulevard between Flower and Oak Streets act as candy stops, a costume contest gets judged at 6:30 p.m., and masks aren't permitted so kids can be identified by the adults walking with them. It's hosted by the Bellflower Chamber of Commerce, and the fact that it's survived long enough to have its own set of rules and expectations is part of why the new festival reads as an addition rather than a competitor. One event asks you to walk a corridor. The other asks you to gather in one spot. Bellflower now runs both.
The Rest of the Fall Calendar
Beyond the two headline events, Bellflower's Parks and Recreation Department has run a handful of other Halloween-season programs in past years, and residents planning their October are likely to see similar offerings return:
- A Halloween-themed swim day at the Bellflower Aquatic Center inside Thompson Park, with pool games and activities built into regular admission
- A Family Dance Party at Thompson Park, run as a blacklight glow event in the gymnasium, with a photo booth, music, and crafts for kids from preschool through eighth grade
- A citywide home Halloween decorating contest, where winning houses get a sign and a letter from the Mayor and City Council, and the broader public is invited to drive the neighborhoods and look
The Parks and Recreation special events page is the place to confirm this year's dates and pricing once they're posted, since the exact weekends can shift year to year.
Why the Order Matters
What makes this fall different isn't just that there's more to do. It's that the two biggest events no longer compete for the same night. The new festival lands first, on September 26, well ahead of the traditional late-October boulevard crawl. That spacing means a family with young kids and a dog isn't forced to choose between a festival built around pets and vendors and a nighttime candy walk built around costume judging and porch lights. They can do both, on different weekends, without either one crowding the other off the calendar.
Most of this still happens along the same corridor. Trick or Treat on the BOO!-levard covers the stretch of Bellflower Boulevard between Flower and Oak. The Aquatic Center and Thompson Park sit further south at 14001 S. Bellflower Boulevard, hosting both the pool day and the glow dance party. SteelCraft's food hall block, at 16500 Bellflower Boulevard, already pulls a crowd on ordinary weekends. A new festival arriving in late September gives that same boulevard one more date on its calendar, without asking anyone to guess which weekend belongs to the kids and which one belongs to the family dog.
A Longer Stretch, Not a Bigger Single Night
None of this means the city is trying to out-festival itself. The home decorating contest still runs on its own timeline through the back half of October, rewarding the kind of yard displays that people keep coming back to look at years after they're first put up. The pool day and dance party at Thompson Park serve a younger crowd that isn't necessarily going to make it to either headline festival. Taken together, what's changed isn't the intensity of any single night. It's that the season now stretches across more weekends and more parts of town than it used to, instead of compressing into one evening on one street.
That's a small shift, but it's the kind of thing that only shows up if you're paying attention to which corner of Bellflower Boulevard is busy on which weekend. A festival built for pets does something a candy crawl can't, and a candy crawl built around judged costumes and mask restrictions does something a stationary festival won't try to replicate. Having both on the calendar, spaced weeks apart instead of stacked on the same night, gives residents an actual choice about how they want to spend the season rather than one format standing in for the whole thing.
If watching Bellflower Boulevard fill up for two different reasons this fall has you thinking more seriously about calling this stretch of the city home instead of just visiting it for the festivals, The Elmer Team can walk you through what's actually for sale along that corridor right now.
