What do you do when one kid in your group wants to be chased by a zombie and the other refuses to walk anywhere near a sign that says "haunted"? In most towns, that means two separate outings, two separate car rides, and two separate nights off your October calendar. In Rockville Centre, it means one address and two gates.
Every fall, the Center for Science, Teaching & Learning turns its Tanglewood Preserve at 1450 Tanglewood Road into Spooky Fest, and the reason the event has lasted this long isn't the fog machines or the zombie dinosaurs. It's the split. CSTL didn't build one haunted trail and call it a night. It built two parallel Octobers on the same footprint, and which one your family experiences depends entirely on which path you choose when you walk through the entrance.
One Preserve, Two Gates
The scary side is called the Haunted Woods Walk, a quarter-mile trail through the darker reaches of the preserve where costumed volunteers, dressed as zombies and other monsters, jump out to startle guests as they pass. The preserve's resident zombie dinosaurs make an appearance here too, which tells you something about the tone CSTL is going for: theatrical, a little absurd, built for kids old enough to laugh once their heart rate comes back down.
Walk through the other gate and you land somewhere completely different. The Mystic Garden Walk is lit, colorful, and deliberately non-scary, a fantasy garden path where friendly characters, butterflies, ghosts, scarecrows, dinosaurs, aliens, Cinderella, and good witches among them, hand out candy and stickers instead of scares. Along the way there's a glow-in-the-dark slime tent, fortune tellers, face painting, and a photo station where kids can meet a prince and princess by their horse and coach.
That's the actual design insight worth knowing before you buy tickets. This isn't one event with a scary section tacked on for older kids. It's two full experiences built into the same nine-plus acres, which means a family with a five-year-old and a twelve-year-old doesn't have to split up or pick a lane. They pick a gate for each visit, and Spooky Fest runs long enough in October that most families end up doing both.
The Four Weekends, and the Assumption to Drop
Spooky Fest 2026 runs Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays across four specific weekends: October 2 through 4, October 9 through 11, October 16 through 19, and October 23 through 25. Hours are 6 to 9:30 p.m., and the event runs rain or shine, so a forecast alone isn't a reason to skip a night you'd already planned around.
| Weekend | Dates | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| First | Oct 2-4 | 6-9:30 p.m. |
| Second | Oct 9-11 | 6-9:30 p.m. |
| Third | Oct 16-19 | 6-9:30 p.m. |
| Fourth | Oct 23-25 | 6-9:30 p.m. |
Here's the detail that trips people up: Spooky Fest does not run through Halloween. The last weekend closes on October 25, a full six days before trick-or-treaters hit the sidewalks on October 31. If your mental model is that a Halloween attraction runs until Halloween, this one breaks that pattern, and it's worth building your calendar around the four listed weekends rather than assuming there's a fifth chance closer to the actual holiday.
Why a Science Nonprofit Runs a Haunted Trail
CSTL is a nonprofit, and Spooky Fest is its single largest fundraiser of the year. That's not incidental marketing copy. It means the ticket you buy to walk either the Haunted Woods or the Mystic Garden is the same ticket that funds the organization's science education programming for the rest of the year, the same programs that bring hands-on learning to kids across the area outside of October.
"We welcome all attendees to enjoy the sights and sounds of the fall season," organizer Havasy has said of the event.
The event also runs almost entirely on volunteers, teenagers and adults who sign up to spend five-hour shifts dressed as monsters in the Haunted Woods or as guides greeting families in the Mystic Garden. That volunteer backbone is part of why the event has held its shape for well over a decade without turning into a franchised, corporate haunted house. It's a community fundraiser wearing a costume, and the costume happens to be very good.
Getting In, and What It Actually Costs
Admission is required for every attendee age two and up, which matters if you're planning around a stroller-age sibling who isn't old enough to remember the visit but is old enough to need a ticket. Recent seasons have priced tickets at $22 for access to the non-scary attractions only, and $27 for an all-inclusive ticket that adds the Haunted Woods Walk. Those numbers reflect a prior season, so treat them as a starting expectation rather than this year's confirmed price, and check current pricing directly through CSTL before you commit a Friday night to it.
Tickets are sold in advance online and, in past years, at the entrance tent, so a walk-up plan is possible if your weekend firms up late. Given that the event runs rain or shine and draws families from across the county on its more popular weekends, buying ahead removes one variable from an October that already has enough of them.
How to Actually Split Your Group
If you're bringing a mixed-age group, the two-gate structure gives you a real decision to make rather than a compromise to negotiate. Younger kids or anyone who gets rattled by jump scares can spend the whole visit in the Mystic Garden Walk and never know the Haunted Woods exists a few hundred feet away. Older kids and adults who want the scare can do the Haunted Woods first, while a parent takes the younger sibling through the Mystic Garden, then trade off or regroup at the glow tent, which sits in the non-scary zone and works as a natural meeting point.
Because the event runs across four separate weekends rather than every night in October, it's also worth treating each weekend as its own opportunity rather than assuming you can catch it whenever. A quiet Friday early in the run tends to feel different from a packed Saturday closer to Halloween, so if a smaller crowd matters more to your group than peak atmosphere, the first weekend in October is the one to target.
Rain-or-shine means you should dress for the actual weather rather than the ideal version of an October evening. The Haunted Woods trail runs through wooded, uneven ground after dark, so footwear that can handle a damp path matters more here than it would at an indoor event.
Living in Rockville Centre means these are the details that actually shape your October, not just whether Spooky Fest exists but which gate to walk through first, which weekend to pick, and why the whole thing wraps up before the holiday it's named for. That's the kind of local detail that only shows up when you've watched an event evolve over more than a decade instead of reading about it once.
Theresa Brown has spent her career in this village for the same reason residents keep coming back to Tanglewood Preserve every October: it's home, and the small, specific things about it are worth knowing well. If a move within Rockville Centre or one of its neighboring South Shore towns is somewhere on your horizon, whether that's this year or down the road, Theresa Brown is a phone call away whenever you're ready to talk through it.
