The door inside Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is deliberately rickety. Pull it back and you walk into a tunnel of fast-spinning motorized moths and bats. Turn a few corners and there is a classic bedsheet ghost, and it takes a moment to work out whether it is an actor or a sculpture. A few corners after that, a red-eyed creature in a ghillie suit is definitely an actor. Everywhere there are life-size art pieces, drawings and video installations that visitors are encouraged to stop and admire, right up until a bloody jester chases them through the exit.
That was the 2025 debut of The Haunt, and it is coming back. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the collective Bat Witch Ghost present the 2026 edition across three nights, Thursday, October 29 through Saturday, October 31, in the venue's 6,000-square-foot Forum at 701 Mission Street. This year's theme is Techno-Fantasy: teams of artists building warped futures out of discarded electronics, salvaged materials and DIY ingenuity. Alongside the maze there is a bar, tarot readings, and local DJs curated by Lower Grand Radio. Tickets are $25, $15 for YBCA members, free for kids 12 and under, and every ticket includes admission to the galleries.
The origin story is smaller and stranger than the venue suggests. Aaron Wojack, a studio artist and photographer, had built a haunted house in the basement of the Soap Factory art gallery in Minneapolis years before; it became the first haunted house his partner, the psychologist Anna Sapozhnikova, ever visited. Later, living in a Mission District apartment building, he turned its service alley and garages into a three-day installation called the Corridor of Horror, built largely from cardboard, papier-mache and colorful light fixtures. Bat Witch Ghost was born from that pilot, with Wojack and Sapozhnikova as its primary animating spirits.
The collective's stated lineage is unusually specific. Its mission statement cites childhood visits to the neighborhood haunts run by the Jaycees, the nationwide community organizations that staged grassroots fundraising haunted houses across the suburbs of the 1970s and 1980s, alongside contemporary art encounters with Cameron Jamie and Thomas Hirschhorn at the Walker Art Center. Wojack's own earliest haunted-house memories are of the Jaycee haunts in the Chicago suburbs; Sapozhnikova's first was the one he helped build in Minneapolis. The result is a haunted house that treats the form as folk art with a budget line: Bat Witch Ghost says it uses recycled and discarded materials whenever possible and aims to pay artists and craftspeople for their work, describing a goal of becoming "a lasting San Francisco tradition."
That ambition scaled up fast. The 2025 run at YBCA, presented as "an artist-made haunted house" that was spooky yet campy, scrappy but full of wonder, drew more than 1,100 people through the labyrinth, according to Bat Witch Ghost. For the second year, Wojack and Sapozhnikova designed a maze subdivided into four sections and assigned teams of artists to each, so that the corridors read as extensions of the individual creators' practices rather than a single unified set. YBCA describes the event as a grassroots haunted house that gathers local artists, tarot readers, DJs and videomakers under one roof, part netherworld labyrinth and part laser-lit speakeasy, entirely made by human hands.
The 2026 schedule spreads across three days. Thursday, October 29 runs 7 to 10 p.m. Friday, October 30 has two shows, including a family-friendly early session at 5 p.m. for children 12 and under, followed by a second show at 8 p.m. Saturday, October 31 closes the run on Halloween night itself. Costumes are encouraged, though full face coverings are not allowed at check-in, and props and drinks stay out of the galleries.
Lower Grand Radio curates the DJ lineup. The pairing fits the event's logic: a scrappy, community-rooted institution borrowing the infrastructure of a major arts center without sanding off its edges. YBCA, which opened in 1993 as the cultural anchor of the Yerba Buena Gardens neighborhood, has framed its recent programming around exactly that kind of gathering.
For anyone who went last year, the pitch is straightforward. The footprint is bigger, the space is weirder, and the jester is presumably still back there somewhere. For everyone else, it is a haunted house where the scariest thing might be how much of it was rescued from a dumpster.