By Topuria Design @ Adobe Stock
In The Wall Street Journal, Rachel Wolfe explains the economic boon being reaped by towns capitalizing on local ghost stories or spooky pasts. She writes:
Cities and towns across the U.S. with even a hint of spook are scrambling to cash in on a Halloween tourism boom.
While travel to the usual haunts such as Salem, Mass., and New Orleans is surging, many lesser-known locales are reporting record visitation as adult revelers take the holiday over from trick-or-treaters. Those visitors are pumping millions into local economies, in some cases helping prop up businesses still recovering from the pandemic years.
The New York town of Sleepy Hollow’s tie to the Washington Irving short story about a headless horseman has always attracted a smattering of mostly local tourists in October. This year, for Sleepy Hollow’s 150th anniversary, the village made a concerted effort to increase seasonal offerings and marketing. Foot traffic was up 29% between Oct. 1 and Oct. 19 over the same dates last year, according to geolocation estimates from analytics firm Datafy.
“We may have done our jobs a little too well,” jokes Lucia Ballas-Traynor, executive director of the local chamber of commerce.
Around 30,000 people—nearly triple the village’s population—attended Sleepy Hollow’s fall craft fair earlier this month. Almost all of the roughly 165 vendors were sold out of such wares as plush black cats and witch-hat cupcakes. Tour buses from around the country have been arriving every day to check out the Gothic mansions and historic cemeteries. Business owners, in turn, say they are seeing their best-ever month of sales.
J.P. Doyle’s Restaurant co-owner Brian Doyle says seatings that outpace last year’s “by many multiples” have finally allowed the Sleepy Hollow business to recover from the pandemic. Los Andes Bakery ran out of “guava monster” cookies and empanadas after selling more than 400 on the Saturday of the craft fair, compared with a daily average of 60.
Sleepy Hollow Bookshop just put in its fourth mass reorder of ghost stories, and Beekman Ale House bought its wholesaler out of almost all of its remaining local craft pumpkin beer.
Read more here.
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