Life News
Living in a Halloween town: Burbank, Salem and the Blue Mountains up close
For some towns Halloween is not one night but a season. The Guardian visited Burbank, the Los Angeles suburb it calls America's Halloween capital, where residents spend months and thousands of dollars turning homes into Disney-style attractions. One resident, Diego Linares, 40, stands in his front yard for three hours every night from mid-September dressed as a horror-film killer. The paper also asks whether Burbank's Halloween is becoming too popular for its own good.
NPR looked at Salem, Massachusetts, famous for the Salem Witch Trials, with host Scott Detrow speaking to reporter Megan Johnson about what it is like to live there during the Halloween tourism season.
In Australia, a Guardian photo essay followed photographer Maja Baska, who roams the streets of North Katoomba in the Blue Mountains each Halloween with an analogue camera, capturing everything from the delightfully banal to the genuinely terrifying, including witches, clowns and a killer durian.
How each outlet framed it
- The Guardian — the spectacle and its strain: home haunts in Burbank and whether success brings problems, plus small-town fun in Katoomba.
- NPR — the residents' side: daily life in a town where Halloween drives tourism.
What we don't know yet: Neither outlet gives visitor numbers or local costs, so the scale of the crowds is described rather than measured.