On the Friday before Halloween, the parking lot of Locust Grove City Hall fills with tailgates instead of sedans. Costumed kids haul treat bags from trunk to trunk, food trucks idle at the edges, and at some point in the evening a hay wagon loads up and rolls out toward the cemetery. The city's free Trunk-or-Treat and Haunted Hayride runs Friday, October 23, 2026, at 3644 Highway 42 in Locust Grove. Admission is free, and the only thing visitors are asked to bring is a costume and a bag for the candy.
The format is familiar to anyone with school-age children: volunteers decorate the open backs of their cars and trucks, and kids work the row collecting candy. The city has put out a call for individuals and organizations to sponsor trunks, which is how these events stay free — the decorations, the candy, and the staffing all come from neighbors and local groups rather than a ticket window. Food trucks and vendors will be on site for anyone who wants to buy dinner or a snack.
What sets Locust Grove's version apart is the hayride. Rather than circling a ball field or a subdivision street, the wagon takes riders through Locust Grove Cemetery. A graveyard hayride is a genuinely old-fashioned kind of scary — closer to the ghost stories that used to be told on front porches than to a commercial haunted house with paid actors and fog machines. It is also, for a certain age of child, exactly the right amount of spooky: dark, a little eerie, and over before anyone has to sleep with the light on.
The setting itself carries more history than most city hall parking lots. The building at 3644 Highway 42 — the same road as U.S. 23 — began life as the Locust Grove Institute, a college preparatory school founded by Locust Grove Baptist Church and Mercer University and opened in 1894. The school was supported largely by the Flint River Association, with help from other associations under a board of trustees, and was taken over by the Georgia Baptist Convention in 1917. Under Mr. and Mrs. Gray and their faculty it grew into one of the leading institutions in Southern education, and it was among the first schools accredited by the Southern Education Association of Secondary Schools and Colleges.
The building that stands today was constructed in 1904 for $14,000, designed by architect James W. Golucke in the Classical Revival style. Earlier wooden structures on the campus were lost to fire and replaced with more substantial buildings. The institute closed in 1929, a casualty of diminishing patronage as public education expanded across Georgia. A Georgia Historical Commission marker erected in 1958 notes that the school "lives in the minds, hearts, and accomplishments of hundreds of graduates." The academic building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986 and now serves as Locust Grove's city hall — which means the trunk-or-treat is staged in the shadow of a 120-year-old schoolhouse.
That history is part of why the cemetery ride lands differently. The graves the wagon passes belong to the families who built the town and sent their children to the institute; the city notes that the historic section of Locust Grove Cemetery is documented through Find a Grave, and that no plots are currently available for sale. For one evening a year, the town's newest residents — many of them in superhero capes and princess dresses — roll slowly past its oldest ones. It is a small, slightly strange civic ritual, and it costs nothing to join.
Locust Grove sits in Henry County about 35 miles southeast of Atlanta, just off Interstate 75 at Exit 212, and has grown quickly in recent decades; the 2020 census counted 8,947 residents. Events like this one are the kind of thing that keeps a fast-growing suburb feeling like a town. The city runs the hayride as an annual tradition, and the Henry County tourism office and family-event calendars list it each fall alongside the county's other Halloween offerings.
Practical notes: arrive in costume, bring a treat bag, and expect the trunk rows to be busiest right at the start. Food trucks take payment, so bring a card or cash if you plan to eat. The hayride line tends to be longest after dark — which, for a cemetery ride, is arguably the point. More information is available through the City of Locust Grove's website and its Facebook page.