For one evening in early October, the wine bars and vintage shops of Ivanhoe Village will look less like a shopping district and more like a neighborhood-sized haunted house. Once Upon a Halloween returns to the strip of North Orange Avenue on Saturday, Oct. 3, 2026, running from 5 to 9 p.m., with a "potion walk" through participating businesses and a free outdoor screening of Ghostbusters in Gaston Edwards Park once the sun goes down.
The premise is simple: buy a commemorative tasting glass, then wander. Participating businesses pour sips of wine, beer, cocktails, mocktails and other specialty refreshments, turning an ordinary Saturday of errands into a slow, sociable crawl. Glasses are $20 if purchased before Sept. 1 — the district calls it the "early-bat special" — and the price rises closer to the event. It is general admission in the truest sense: no reserved seats, no assigned times, just a wristband and a stretch of sidewalk.
The evening is not only for adults. Organizers have promised trick-or-treating at some stops, ghost stories told on porches, and a spooky market hosted by Collective Corner on the lawn at City Food Hall. The night ends under the stars in Gaston Edwards Park at 1236 N. Orange Ave., where Ghostbusters — the 1984 comedy about a crew of unlicensed paranormal exterminators in New York City — will play on an outdoor screen.
This is only the second year for Once Upon a Halloween, which made its debut on Oct. 4, 2025. That first edition looked a little different: the potion walk glasses went for $25, and the movie in the park was Hocus Pocus, the 1993 Disney film about three resurrected Salem witches. The 2025 event also included a "Ghost Stories in the Neighborhood" walk, in which select homes in Ivanhoe Village and neighboring Lake Formosa opened their porches from 5:30 to 8 p.m. so passersby could hear a different ghostly tale every ten minutes. Organizers have said more details about this year's trick-or-treating and porch ghost stories will follow.
What makes the setting work is that Ivanhoe Village has been a place for gathering — and for a certain amount of spectacle — for well over a century. The district takes its name from Lake Ivanhoe, and its identity was built around a strip of antique shops that once made the area known as Antique Row, a stretch of Orange Avenue where nearly every storefront dealt in old furniture, glassware and curios. Today the neighborhood is an accredited Main Street district, one of Orlando's smallest and most walkable, defined by one- and two-story Art Deco-influenced storefronts, independent restaurants, breweries and creative studios. It also brushes up against Loch Haven Cultural Park, home to the Orlando Science Center, the Orlando Museum of Art, the Orlando Ballet, Orlando Shakes and the Mennello Museum of American Art.
The park where the movie will screen carries its own history. Gaston Edwards Park is named for Dr. Gaston Holcombe Edwards, a surgeon who worked at the Colon Hospital in the Panama Canal Zone before settling in Orlando in 1909. In 1925 he and his partner, Dr. John McEwan, bought a building at the corner of Eola Drive and Robinson Street and turned it into a modern clinic staffed by eleven doctors. The piece of land along the lake was renamed in his honor in 1937. Today the park offers a playground, grilling area, fitness station and a connection to the Orlando Urban Trail — a fittingly low-key monument for a physician who spent his career patching people up.
But the strangest and best chapter of Ivanhoe Village's history belongs to the triangular lot where North Orange Avenue points toward the lake. For nearly fifty years, that patch of ground was home to Kemp's Coliseum, billed as "Central Florida's Playground." The building opened on Dec. 23, 1926, during Florida's giddy 1920s land boom, put up by the Orlando Coliseum Corporation and builder C.F. Cullen, who was raising sister venues in St. Petersburg and on Davis Island at the same time. The opening was a multiday blowout with vaudeville acts, an elaborate indoor light show and the Tom Danks Orchestra playing deep into the night. At its center was a solid maple dance floor, 114 by 132 feet, laid in a log-cabin pattern that dancers and roller skaters would polish smooth for the next five decades.
Over the years the Coliseum hosted big bands, bowling, a swimming pool with a diving board, and eventually rock shows — a teenage crowd once screamed for The Who inside its walls. Long before that, the lake itself had been the center of an unlikely industry: an early Orlando entrepreneur named George I. Russell, who moved to Florida from Connecticut in 1885, bought land on the southern shore of Lake Ivanhoe and helped make the area a hub of the American pineapple trade before turning the same ground into one of Orlando's first amusement parks. Orlando historian Eve Bacon described the result as "an amusement and recreation park on Lake Ivanhoe, that became the favorite gathering place for Orlandoans of all ages."
That is the long shadow the potion walk now steps into. The same stretch of Orange Avenue that once drew crowds for big bands, cannonballs off a diving board and a screaming teenage audience is now drawing them for a $20 tasting glass and a 1984 movie about ghosts. The neighborhood has changed hands, changed trades and changed names more than once. What has not changed is the habit of gathering there after dark.
Tickets and more information are available through the Ivanhoe Village event page. The potion walk runs 5 to 9 p.m.; the Ghostbusters screening in Gaston Edwards Park caps the night.