Halloween in Newcastle City Centre

Halloween falls on a Saturday in 2026, at the end of the October half-term week, which is about as good as the calendar gets for the city centre. It means a full week of daytime half-term activity followed by a Saturday night with everything on at once.

This guide covers what is on inside the city centre itself. Dates and programmes change every year and the popular things sell out early, so treat everything here as a prompt to go and book rather than a promise.

The free one: Time Odyssey at the Great North Museum

The best-value family thing in the city centre over half-term costs nothing. Time Odyssey at the Great North Museum: Hancock is an augmented-reality quest played on a tablet, created by Art Explora and the British Museum, in which families help four characters lost in time find their way home by solving challenges around the galleries. One is a Roman centurion, another an Ancient Egyptian tomb painter.

It runs on Thursday 29 October, with timed collection slots from 10.15am and the activity running through to around 2.30pm. It is free, but booking is essential and the slots go. Children under eight will need an adult working alongside them rather than trailing behind.

Best for:

Best for: families with primary-age children who want a proper half-term outing without paying for it.

Sleeping over with the dinosaurs

The same museum runs a Halloween Sleepover on the night of Friday 30 October, from 5pm through to 10am the next morning. Children aged 6 to 12 spend the night in the galleries among the dinosaurs and mummies, with themed activities, a torchlit trail and breakfast before home time. It is £85 per person and it is the sort of thing children remember for years.

This is the one to book furthest ahead. A museum sleepover on the eve of Halloween has a finite number of floor spaces.

Halloween After Dark at Life

Life Science Centre on Times Square opens after hours on Saturday 31 October for Halloween After Dark, with spooky science, shows and hands-on activities across the galleries. Life is a charity that takes no public funding, so unlike the council-run museums it charges admission, but it is a two-minute walk from Central Station and the evening slot suits families who want something atmospheric without it being genuinely frightening.

For grown-ups: the Tyneside all-nighter

The Tyneside Cinema's Halloween All-Nighter is a city institution. A marathon of horror classics and cult favourites, run through the night of 31 October in a 1930s newsreel theatre on Pilgrim Street, which is a considerably better room to watch a horror film in than a multiplex. Tickets go on sale through the cinema and the programme is announced closer to the date.

Carrie, and then a prom

The Star and Shadow Cinema on Warwick Street does the most committed thing in the city on 31 October: a screening of Brian De Palma's Carrie from 6pm to 8pm, followed by a full prom night in the venue space from 8pm until 1am. Prance DJs play, there is a vote for Prom King and Queen, a photo and selfie station, and prom punch from the bar.

Tickets are tiered at £8, £10 or £12 for the film and prom together, and there is a cheaper party-only ticket at £5 or £7 if you want the prom without watching a bucket of pig's blood get tipped over anyone. Book through the venue's TicketSource page.

Best for:

Best for: anyone who wants Halloween night to be a proper event rather than a themed pub.

Ghosts of History at Newcastle Castle

Newcastle has the raw material for this better than most English cities: a Norman keep, a medieval gatehouse, surviving stretches of town wall, and several hundred years of plague, executions and river trade to draw on.

Newcastle Castle leans into it properly with a season called Ghosts of History, running from 1 October to 2 November. Four things sit inside it:

• Halloween Ghost Tours on 29, 30 and 31 October — a 60-minute after-dark tour inside the Castle built around grim history, ghostly tales and dark deeds.
• Halloween Walking Tours on every Monday and Friday in October, which puts two of them (the 26th and the 30th) inside half-term week. These are the Castle's guided tour of the old city given a seasonal turn, and they are charged separately rather than included in the annual pass.
• A self-led Trick or Treat Trail through the building, hunting clues and challenges for a secret message left by the Castle's ghosts. Included in the annual pass.
• Gory Tours during half-term, a guided walk through the darker side of the Castle's history. Also included in the pass.

There is also a Halloween drawing competition with the winning artwork displayed in the Museum Room, and an appearance from Jane Martin, a real figure from Newcastle's own witch trials.

Worth knowing before you plan around it: the Castle has not published start times or prices for the Halloween programme, because booking runs through a ticketing widget rather than a printed listing. Check the Castle's Halloween page for live times.

Ghost walks through the old town

Two separate things run outdoors, and they suit very different groups.

Newcastle Ghost Walks has been running city-centre walks since 2006 and its public outdoor tours, including the Halloween Special, are explicitly 16 and over only at £13 a head. They also run a costumed family walk, Wicked Newcastle, which is the one to look for if you have younger children. Dates for Halloween week sit behind their booking shop rather than on the listing page, so check before you plan an evening around it.

Separately, a Ghosts and Grisly Tales charity walking tour runs on Saturday 31 October, 3pm to 4.30pm, meeting at Grey's Monument. It is £15, guided by Rob Chapman through ghost, witch and murder stories along the Tyne, with proceeds going to the youth mental-health charity Us Active. The listing does not state an age suitability, so ask if you are thinking of bringing children.

Best for:

Best for: the 3pm charity walk is the one that works in daylight with the family still in tow. The £13 outdoor walks are adults only.

Spooky Night at the Discovery Museum

The best-organised family Halloween event in the city centre is at the Discovery Museum on Friday 30 October, and it is the only one that has published everything up front. Spooky Night at the Museum runs in two sittings, 4.30pm to 6.30pm for younger children and 7.30pm to 9.30pm for older ones, with dancing, activities and the run of the museum after hours. It is £8 per child and £6 per adult, booking required, and it is pitched at ages 4 to 12.

Splitting it by age is a sensible touch that not many venues bother with, and it means the early session genuinely suits a four-year-old rather than tolerating one.

Half-term daytimes if the weather turns

Newcastle in late October is reliably wet, and the city centre's free museums are the obvious answer. The Discovery Museum has a run of ticketed half-term sessions through the week: a Trick or Treat spooky challenge on 27 October, Discover a Story on the 28th for younger children, and a Time Travel Club on the 29th run with The National Archives. Some of these sell out, so book rather than turn up.

The Laing Art Gallery runs a Little Artists Plus+ session on 26 October for one to five year olds. Not Halloween-themed, but it is the right thing for the age group the spooky events exclude. At the Great North Museum, the Greggs Ta-Pastry exhibition opens on 24 October alongside Bayeux-on-Tyne, so there is a reason to go even on a day with nothing seasonal booked.

Entry to the Discovery Museum, the Laing and the Great North Museum is free; the half-term sessions inside them are not always. Newcastle City Library runs children's sessions through the holidays and is warm, central and costs nothing at all.

Just outside the centre

The Ouseburn valley, ten minutes east, is the other half of Newcastle's Halloween and has its own concentration of family and late-night events. Our sister site covers it in Halloween in Heaton and the Ouseburn.

For pumpkin patches, haunted castles and family spooktaculars across the wider region, see Halloween in the North East.

Practical notes

Halloween night is a Saturday, so the city centre will be busy with the ordinary Saturday crowd as well as everyone in costume. Metro runs later on Saturdays than midweek, but check the last departure from Monument or Haymarket for your line before you commit to a 1am finish, and be aware that late-night taxi demand on Halloween is closer to New Year than to a normal weekend.

If you are bringing children into town after dark, the Bigg Market and Collingwood Street end of the centre gets lively early on a Saturday night. The museums, Times Square and the Pilgrim Street cinemas sit away from that.

Know a city-centre Halloween event we have missed? Get in touch via our contact page.