On a Friday evening in late October, the lights of Midtown Atlanta will be doing what they always do — traffic on Peachtree, the glow of office towers, the ordinary hum of a city heading into the weekend. Inside St. Luke's Episcopal Church at 435 Peachtree Street, something older and stranger will be happening: a pipe organ, several thousand pipes' worth of it, playing Halloween music.
"Haunted Harmonies for Organ" is a free recital on Friday, October 23, 2026, beginning at 7:30 p.m. and running about an hour. No ticket is required, parking on site is free, and the church is a short walk from the Civic Center MARTA Station. A free reception follows in the church hall. The program is part of Music at St. Luke's, the parish's concert series, now in its seventh season, supported by the Friends of Music and parishioners.
The performers are several distinguished local organists, including St. Luke's own resident musicians. The instrument they'll play is the reason the evening is worth more than a passing glance.
The Alston Memorial Organ is an Austin organ, built by the Hartford, Connecticut firm founded in 1893 by John T. Austin, the engineer whose air-chest system reshaped how modern pipe organs are built. St. Luke's instrument was installed in 1963, and the parish considers it one of the finest pipe organs in the Southeast. Its design and installation were the work of Dr. Hugh Hodgson, who served as St. Luke's organist and choir director from 1928 until 1969 — four decades in the same loft, spanning the church's life from the eve of the Depression through the civil rights era and into the moon landing.
Hodgson was a figure well beyond Peachtree Street. He was a pianist, organist and composer, and he led the music department at the University of Georgia; the university's Hugh Hodgson School of Music still carries his name. A recording survives of the dedication program he played on the new Alston Memorial organ, issued with a booklet containing the instrument's history and stoplist — a document of a moment when a downtown parish staked a serious claim on the city's musical life.
That claim has needed upkeep. In recent years the parish marked the sixtieth anniversary of the organ's installation and established the Hodgson Organ Fund to honor its longtime organist's legacy and to pay for the instrument's regular maintenance. The organ was scheduled for re-leathering, the thorough and intricate overhaul required roughly every thirty years. An organ of this size is less a piece of furniture than a machine with a lifespan, and keeping it alive is a long, expensive, unglamorous act of custodianship. A free recital is one way of letting the public hear what the custodianship is for.
St. Luke's itself has a history that suits a haunted program. The congregation was founded during the Civil War as a refuge for those fleeing the war's destruction; it has been nicknamed the Phoenix for rising as the conflict raged around it. Its first rector, Charles Todd Quintard, was a physician before he was a priest — born into a medical family in New England, he moved to Athens, Georgia, in 1848 to practice medicine, later taught medicine in Memphis, and was ordained after leaving the field. When the war came, Tennessee volunteers asked him to serve as a Confederate chaplain, and he also worked as a field surgeon. The church he helped plant in Atlanta has been on Peachtree ever since, and in the mid-twentieth century, when many downtown congregations decamped for the suburbs, St. Luke's made a deliberate decision to stay put. The parish describes its story as one of "vision, rebirth and service" — a "little refugee church" that chose the city over the suburbs.
The building is late English Gothic, with details borrowed from other styles worked in. Its stained glass has its own history: windows came from Germany, England and the United States, and one of the altar windows is said to have been brought over from a chapel in England during the Second World War. During last year's Atlanta Streets Alive event on Peachtree, St. Luke's was among the churches that opened its doors so passersby could step in and look at the glass.
That instinct — open doors, no ticket, come in off the street — is the spirit of this recital. Organ music has a reputation for formality, for recitals attended by people who already know the difference between a reed and a rank. A Halloween program on a big romantic instrument in a Gothic nave is a friendlier proposition. The parish hasn't published a list of selections, but the theme points toward seasonal favorites — the kind of music that shows off what a pipe organ does better than almost anything else: low pedal notes you feel in the floor, sudden full-organ chords, and the eerie, breathy colors of pipes that sound like nothing else in an orchestra.
It is also a chance to hear a landmark instrument in the room it was built for. Organs are site-specific; they are designed around a particular building's acoustics and architecture, and the Alston Memorial was designed by a man who knew that nave intimately for forty years. Hearing it played by a roster of Atlanta organists, on a Friday night in October, with the reception afterward and no admission charge, is about as low-stakes as a serious concert gets.
The recital begins at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, October 23, 2026, at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, 435 Peachtree Street NE, Atlanta. Admission is free, no ticket needed, with free on-site parking and the Civic Center MARTA Station a seven-minute walk away. More information is available through the church's Music at St. Luke's pages and the parish's Facebook page.