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How the Village Halloween Parade keeps its soul
By
Hannah Frishberg
Published Oct 28, 2026 at 12:38 p.m. ET
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Tod Seelie for Gothamist
By
Hannah Frishberg
Published Oct 28, 2026 at 12:38 p.m. ET
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It is a logistical fact that events tend to lose their soul as they scale up. More people means more problems, more expenses, more liability and higher expectations. To meet them, organizers generally must sacrifice some amount of quality, community and heart.
By all means, this should apply to the Village Halloween Parade, which began in 1974 as a roving get-together of like-minded puppeteers and artists and has since grown into one of the world's biggest Halloween parades. The annual event, which draws 50,000 participants and 2 million spectators, has become a city-sanctioned ordeal requiring street closures, crowd control and NYPD liaisons.
But even as New York City's artistic spirit has been flattened by rising rents and the drab preferences of those who pay them, the Village Halloween Parade has remained a beacon of creative expression, a mainstream, humanity-uniting delight that is still deeply weird.
The barn at Rokeby.
Tod Seelie for Gothamist
It's managed the feat due to the dedication of Jeanne Fleming, a purple-haired octogenarian who's served as the parade’s director since 1980.
“ This is nothing like any other parade. This is really a march of spirit and creativity and imagination. So it doesn't work like anything else,” Fleming said from her red-linteled house at Rokeby, the Hudson Valley estate where she’s lived for 54 years. The parade is less than a week away, but she’s that rare artist who knows how to delegate, so at this point her plate is mostly full of what she calls “detail work,” like being on call in case of crisis, or managing the 100 or so emails she receives each hour.
“What happens is I download all the information into everybody's brains, and then I'm kind of free,” she said as a geriatric long-haired cat named Kitty lounged beneath photos of bygone parades piled next to her cluttered desktop.
Meanwhile, down the gravel path, in a cavernous barn, volunteers fix and finish puppets old and new.
The "puppet raising" ahead of the parade.
Tod Seelie for Gothamist
This is the final “puppet-raising,” an October weekend fixture, when the greater puppet community descends on Rokeby to create, choreograph and practice the leading number, transforming the estate’s road into a stand-in for Sixth Avenue.
The process is led by Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles, who met and later married after working on the parade in 1998, and have lived in a house attached to the barn since 2007. Today they are leading a smattering of volunteers collaborating on various puppet-related tasks. Country singer Townes Van Zandt is crooning through the speakers and a woman is dancing with an enormous window-shaped puppet on a rod beneath the barn’s soaring rafters. Outside, others peacefully papier-mâché among winged clocks in the fading afternoon light. Everyone is at least somewhat covered in paint.
Sophia Michahelles.
Tod Seelie for Gothamist
“People are so willing to do this because you're in an ensemble of 50 people, and we're all making this one tableau vivant together,” Kahn said. “And we're doing it not online and not through some mediated experience. It's happening here and now in physical space, and literally a million people are gonna see it.”
He’s standing in front of a mood board displaying various surreal printouts illustrating this year’s theme, Body and Soul, an exploration of the relationship between the physical and spirit worlds. That’s consistent with past years' cerebral themes, which utilize the puppets’ big performance not for sponsorship or pop culture mimicry but to “expand people's notion of what is possible for Halloween self-transformation,” Kahn said as various children wander in and out of the door connecting his home to the barn. “The parade is an invitation to think. It's an invitation to go deeper into some aspect of our collective mythology, and then make it visual and impactful for the crowd.”
Alex Kahn working on puppets.
Tod Seelie for Gothamist
Lake Simons, who’s been participating in puppet-raisings since 2001 and came up from Brooklyn to help prep, said “it becomes something that everyone's got their hands in and therefore it becomes more powerful. We all feel like, I participated in this magical event and my hand was a part of this.”
Indeed, there are more people interested in helping than the core Rokeby crew can accommodate, a fact they clearly feel bad about.
The volunteer power is vital as the Parade still runs on a shoestring budget. Thankfully rent at Rokeby is low, for some buildings nil, and many hands make lighter work of maintaining and bringing giant puppets to life.
As with money, many operational elements have not scaled along with the parade’s size and influence over the years, although there have been numerous small shifts: Parade progenitor Ralph Lee used to store the puppets in the shaft of a decommissioned West Beth elevator. Then for a time they lived in Fleming’s house, before eventually being moved to the barn. Fleming used to cook for all the volunteers herself; that job was eventually passed on to a longtime friend, then to the friend’s daughter.
The "puppet raising"
Tod Seelie for Gothamist
Fleming still sees the Parade not as a job but an opportunity to create and maintain an annual moment that also serves as a throughline of meaning and belonging in many peoples’ lives.
“ I feel like what I do is I send a ping out into the universe, and then who responds?” she says. “There's one family, their mom died at 35. The kids are in their 20s now, and they come every year for her. They carry puppets and celebrate her life and who she was. There’s so much like that.”
People have gotten engaged and married at the parade. Some have even asked Fleming to imbue their dead grandmother’s spirit into puppets.
“Every kind of thing you could imagine. People just call up and say, ‘I wanna do this,’ and I say, yes, OK, now how do we make it happen? And that’s the game. That’s what’s fun. Being able to allow all these people to realize a dream that they have. That's what it's about for me.”
Skeletons in the barn at Rokeby.
Tod Seelie for Gothamist
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Hannah Frishberg
Hannah Frishberg covers New York City arts and culture. Got a tip? Email Hannah at [email protected].
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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