From a Driveway Haunted House to a Map of Halloween Events

When I was a kid, my family drove out to the pumpkin farm every year and hunted for the biggest pumpkin we could find. I mean massive.

Then came the best part: carving it with an electric saw, because a knife wasn’t going to cut it. People walked up to see it.

A few years later, in grade school, I turned our driveway into a haunted house. I put up a 20-by-40-foot tent and built six rooms inside it. By opening night there was a line down the block.

I still can’t tell you which part I loved more: building it or watching people come out of it. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. I’ve gone to haunted houses every year since I was a kid, and I still do. Anything Halloween, I’m in.

The Six-Tabs Problem

Every October I end up in the same spot: phone in hand, six tabs open, trying to work out whether the pumpkin patch two towns over is actually open this weekend.

Halloween events are scattered. A haunted house has a Facebook page last updated in 2023. A trunk-or-treat is a flyer on a church door. The corn maze has a website, but it still shows last year’s dates.

I got tired of it, so I built the thing I wanted. It’s a free map of Halloween events called BooMap.

What’s on It

Pumpkin patches and corn mazes, trunk-or-treats, family events, fall festivals, ghost tours and haunted houses for the brave. As of October 4 that’s 2,326 events in 90 US cities.

Checking the Dates

Nothing frustrates me more than driving to an event that isn’t happening. So every event is checked against the venue’s or organizer’s own website for 2026 dates.

If I can’t confirm one yet, it doesn’t go in the main list. It goes in a separate section, clearly marked as not confirmed, and we recheck those every week.

Scare Levels, So Nobody Gets Surprised

If you’ve ever taken a seven-year-old to something much scarier than the flyer suggested, you know why this matters.

Every listing shows a suggested age (All Ages, Teens+, or Adults Only) and a 1 to 5 ghost scare level. A pumpkin farm is a 1. The haunted house that makes grown adults scream is a lot higher. These are suggestions, and where a venue publishes its own age guidance, that wins.

The Boo Awards

Voting for the first Boo Awards runs October 1 to 25. In each city, fans vote for Best Pumpkin Patch, Best for Little Goblins, Boo’s Hidden Gem, Most Fun Overall, and Most Likely to Make You Scream.

Boo’s Hidden Gem is only for small, local events, so no theme parks, zoos or chains. Winners are announced October 27.

Running an Event?

Listings are free. If your event is missing or something’s wrong, email hello@boomap.app and I’ll fix it.

And if you try it and spot something I missed in your town, tell me. That’s how it gets better.

Happy haunting,
Andrew

BooMap is free to browse on the web at boomap.app, on the App Store and on Google Play. An optional $2.99 one-time Season Pass adds bigger route-planning tools.