Queen Creek offers new, smaller Halloween events

After thousands attended Trunk or Treat Halloween in downtown Queen Creek in 2023, the town decided to shut it down because of rising costs and its increasingly unwieldy size.

Queen Creek Council Member Dawn Oliphant fondly remembers taking her two young ones to the town’s early Trunk or Treat Halloween events 20 years ago.

“My kids are 23 and 21 now,” she said. “They were very little when we moved here and when Trunk or Treat started it was so small we just did it at Desert Mountain Park, and we just used to line up on the basketball court and you’d have one row of trunks.”

Over those past two decades, Trunk or Treat Halloween grew with the town, eventually becoming a victim of its own success.

“We obviously participated in all the trunk or treats and then it just got so large. It had grown to the communities outside of Queen Creek. Everybody came in and it was a great time, but it just kept getting larger and larger and larger,” Oliphant said. “What I had heard from other residents was it was too big and that it was too much.”

At the last Trunk or Treat Halloween in 2023, more than 20,000 people descended on the Town Center and the event had grown to more than a quarter of a mile with numerous activities such as haunted houses joining the once humble trunks. It had also turned into a traffic headache.

In 2024, the town pulled the plug on Trunk or Treat Halloween.

“As the Town Center continues to develop, parking options north of Ocotillo Road are becoming more and more limited. In addition, the size and scope of the event required a two-day closure of Ellsworth Road to safely set up and take down,” according to a town statement in 2024 announcing the shuttering of the event. “The extended closure resulted in increased traffic congestion in the heart of the community. The event itself was also becoming increasingly expensive to produce — even with scaling back activities and reducing the amount of candy, the event was projected to exceed budgetary constraints for 2024.”

Since then, the Town Center has attracted even more development. The town’s economic development department has stated that about $200 million in private investment is being pumped into the Downtown Core.

“What we started hearing was a lot of the neighborhoods were starting to host their own Halloween events. We just felt like we had a great run at it and I think it served its purpose for all the years that we did it, but we really wanted to see it continue to go back into neighborhoods and go back into the local businesses and the churches,” Oliphant said. “We were very comfortable when we decided, as a council, that (2023) was going to be the last year and that we would just focus on some other events.”

While 2024 was bereft of a town-sponsored Halloween, Queen Creek gradually started celebrating the day with more modest events that have been made possible by the Queen Creek Recreation and Aquatic Center, 22343 E. Ryan Road, and the adjacent Frontier Family Park, 20039 S. 220th St.

This year, the park and center will host a free Teen Fall Fest on Oct. 17, Spooky Splash and the Not So Spooky Halloween Party on Oct. 24 and All Hallows’ Eve on Oct. 29.

“One of the things that the community did a really good job of when Trunk or Treat was ended was that churches and the HOAs and the community groups were enabled to do their smaller Halloween events, their more community-based Halloween events,” Adam Robinson, director of parks and recreation, said. “We didn’t really feel the need to fill that gap as much. There’s no connection between these the newer kinds of Halloween-themed family events here at the rec center and the old Trunk or Treat.”

However, parks and recreation staff acknowledged that center members were looking for more family-oriented activities.

“We know that our members, our customers, our residents crave more fun activities, more family-based activities, and this just provided us an opportunity to provide that for them here at our new rec center,” Robinson said.

This is actually the second year for the Spooky Splash, which quietly made its debut in 2025.

“We did a smaller kind of initial version of it last year. Last year we had such a good positive response that this year we’ve grown it a little bit, just kind of added some activities, and we think it’ll be pretty popular,” Robinson said.

He expects a couple of hundred people to show up at each event.

“We have such amazingly talented staff,” Oliphant said. “It’s so cool to see the different events that they want to try. You know, we can always try them, see how our community responds. If it’s not a successful one, then you know, hey, we won’t do that again. Or if it’s very successful, then they’ll put it on the calendar and have it again next year.”

Janet Perez can be reached at jperez@iniusa.org. Please send your comments about this article to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.