From a first-year gamble to a Grand Island tradition

Every good Halloween story starts a little smaller than you'd expect. Grand Island's Haunted Market did too. When it launched in 2024, the organizers at 15 Monkeys pulled together more than a hundred vendors and a dozen or so food trucks and hoped folks would show up. More than four thousand of them did. For a first-year event on the Island, that's not a soft open. That's a signal.

By its second year, the thing had grown legs, or maybe broomsticks. It became the event that kicks off the whole spooky season out here, the one that tells you it's finally okay to put the skeleton on the porch. And now the 3rd Annual Haunted Market is set for Saturday, September 19, 2026, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., this time at Veterans Park on Bedell Road. Same crew, new footprint, same idea, which is to turn a corner of Grand Island into a walkable Halloween wonderland for a single day.

The year the witches took over Whitehaven Road

If you want to understand what this market has become, rewind to Saturday, September 13, 2025. That's when the Haunted Market spread across the Town Commons on Baseline Road with more than 150 vendors, ten food trucks lined up along Whitehaven Road, and a 26-foot gaming truck for the kids who'd rather fight zombies than shop for candles.

There were six "Dawn of the Dead" actors wandering the grounds, a "Thriller" routine from a group called Step in Time, and, front and center, a coven of dancing witches. That last part is not a figure of speech.

The food side was no small thing either. Organizers shut down Whitehaven Road and lined the whole stretch with food trucks, and in past years those trucks have done so well they've sold clean out of a lot of their menu. There's something about the smell of fair food on a cool September afternoon that turns a shopping trip into an event.

The witches are a Buffalo group called Be Witched Buffalo, and they performed twice, at noon and again at 2 p.m., right out on Whitehaven Road. They danced with brooms and bubbles to a whole soundtrack of Halloween music, including "Come Little Children," the haunting little lullaby from "Hocus Pocus." Picture a September afternoon, the light going gold, and a line of women in black hats moving together while kids and parents crowd in with their phones up. That's the Haunted Market in one snapshot.

Meet the witches of Be Witched Buffalo

Here's the part a lot of people at the market don't realize while they're watching. Those witches aren't just there for the show. They dance for charity, and they pick a brand-new cause every single year.

"We are a group of local Western New York women, who decided to come together and do something meaningful for charity," said Jolene Bryman of Be Witched Buffalo. "Every year, we pick a new charity." Over the years that's meant White Whiskers Senior Dog Sanctuary, and, the year before, Butterfly Moon, which supports families through infant loss. In 2025 they danced for Haven House, which helps survivors of domestic violence through the Family Justice Center. "Everybody knows somebody who's been touched by it," Bryman said.

The dancers, she'll happily tell you, are not professionals. They're women from every walk of life. "We have a lot of fun," Bryman said. "What we try to do is to empower women, help them stand in their power, and, together, we try to build community. We try to paint the witch in a beautiful light."

And they mean everybody. "We try to stay very inclusive. We welcome everybody," Bryman said. "We have one really sassy dancer, who is in a wheelchair, that dances better than all of us. Also, we have a legally blind dancer that dances with all of us, too." She calls the whole thing a sisterhood, and she means it as more than a nice word. "We have women of all different faiths, different ethnicities, all different walks of life," Bryman said. "We come together, and it's really a sisterhood." Some women arrive shy, she said, and leave with a confidence they carry out into the rest of their lives. "What makes me happiest is seeing people smile and have fun," she said.

Floral crowns and a soul-crushing day job

Walk the rows of tents and you'll meet people like Ashley Sloier, who runs a little outfit called Nefarious Creations. Her thing is floral crowns, the kind she designs and makes by hand.

Her path to them is pure Halloween. "I started doing floral crowns as a makeup artist," Sloier said. "I was doing a lot of Halloween makeups. I started doing that at a haunted house when I was 15 years old. I'm 35 now, so it's been a part of my life for 20 years." Twenty years of turning faces into something out of a dream or a nightmare, and now she builds the crowns that finish the look.

The rest of the year, Sloier works in the insurance industry. She's honest about what the market means to her. "It's therapy for me. I work a stressful job," she said. "You've got to have that soul-crushing boring job that stresses you out and then you get to do this." By 2025 she'd figured out how to really do it right. "This year, we got to actually plan it out a little bit better since we were rookies last year," she said, watching visitors wander in to try on her crowns and ask what inspired them.

She's dreaming bigger than Halloween, too. Sloier said she wants to branch the crowns out to weddings, photo shoots, and boudoir sessions, and that the interest has taken off. "It's really picked up here. It's gotten popular," she said. "So far, I've had a lot of people come in. They want to try on the floral crowns. They ask what the inspiration was for them." That's the quiet thing a market like this does for the people in the tents. It doesn't just sell their stuff for a day. It shows them the thing they make in their off hours might be a real business.

Her verdict on the Haunted Market? Seven words a lot of vendors would echo. "This is the Super Bowl of markets."

Oddities, pumpkins, and a petting zoo, all in one field

Part of what makes people drive over the bridge for this is the sheer variety. It isn't one thing. It's a hundred things in one field.

The market has leaned hard into the oddities-and-curiosities world, the strange and wonderful stuff you won't find at a regular craft fair. Past years have brought tarot card readers and hair braiding, a petting zoo and DIY pumpkin painting, fall-themed desserts and a mobile haunted house that carries the scares right to you. The food trucks have done so well that some of them have sold clean out. And it's built to be family-friendly, free to walk into, with free parking, which is a rare and beautiful thing in the fall-festival world.

That mix is the secret. Grandma can hunt for candles while the teenagers blast zombies in the gaming truck and the little ones paint a pumpkin, all within a few hundred feet of each other. Nobody's bored, and nobody's rushed.

The 3rd Annual Haunted Market moves to Veterans Park

For 2026, the Haunted Market is settling into Veterans Park at 1715 Bedell Road, and the date to circle is Saturday, September 19, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. It's still run by 15 Monkeys, still built around local vendors, Halloween goods, spooky décor, candles, costumes, treats, and music, and still designed to be the kind of day where you lose a few hours without meaning to.

If the last two years are any guide, you'll want to come hungry, bring a little cash for the vendors who catch your eye, and leave room in your afternoon for whatever the organizers cook up. A market that jumped from four thousand people to a Town Commons takeover in a single year tends to keep raising its own bar.

Why a spooky little market matters out here

It would be easy to write off a Halloween market as just shopping with cobwebs. But that misses what's actually happening on Grand Island every September. A group of women in witch hats is quietly raising money for domestic violence survivors and senior dogs. A makeup artist is turning a stressful insurance job into a tent full of floral crowns and happy strangers. More than a hundred small makers are getting one great day to be seen.

That's the real trick of the Haunted Market. It dresses up like ghosts and ghouls, but underneath the costumes it's about the same thing this whole region is always about, which is neighbors showing up for each other. On Saturday, September 19, they'll do it again at Veterans Park, one broomstick and one floral crown at a time. Bring the kids. Say hi to the witches. Grand Island's spooky season starts here.