By the last week of October, most of the boats on Lake Winnipesaukee are already out of the water or headed that way. The Mount Washington is the exception. On October 24, 2026, the big white motorship casts off from its berth at 211 Lakeside Avenue in Laconia for the Halloween Masquerade Ball, the final cruise of its season. For the evening, a ship that has spent a century and a half carrying tourists around the lake turns into something closer to a floating party: a buffet dinner laid out from boarding until about ninety minutes after departure, live entertainment on the main deck, bar service, and a costume contest.
It is a 21-and-over affair. Everyone aboard has to be of drinking age, which changes the mood of the thing considerably. This is not the narrated scenic tour of July, with families lined up along the rail and a narrator pointing out the Governor's Island cottages. It is a Halloween party with a bar service, live entertainment, and a judging table.
What makes the evening more than just another themed boat ride is the boat. The Mount Washington is one of the oldest continuously operating passenger vessels in the country, and its history is inseparable from the lake it circles.
The first Mount Washington was a wooden side-wheel steamer launched in 1872, built by the Boston and Maine Railroad to move passengers and freight between the lake's ports. It was 178 feet long with a 49-foot beam, driven by a single-cylinder steam engine of 450 horsepower turning a walking beam high above the upper deck. Because it was the fastest vessel on the water and had the railroad behind it, it quickly dominated lake transportation. By the end of the nineteenth century it was carrying more than 60,000 passengers in a single season, a figure that is hard to picture now, when the lake's summer traffic arrives by car.
As the automobile eroded the railroad's business, the ship was sold in 1922 to Captain Leander Lavallee, who ran it as a tourist attraction rather than a ferry. Weirs Beach in those years was a genuine resort: a busy railroad station, a large dance pavilion, and a grand hotel overlooking the bay. Then came the fires. The Hotel Weirs burned in 1924. On a cold December evening in 1939, fire broke out in the railroad station and spread down the ramp to the dock where the old Mount lay up for the winter. Crews tried to set her free, but the lake was low and she was stuck in the mud. The ship burned to the waterline, and the station with it.
Lavallee's answer was audacious. He acquired the SS Chateaugay, a steamer then on Lake Champlain, had it cut into twenty sections, shipped the pieces by rail to Lakeport, and reassembled them. The new SS Mount Washington II was launched in August 1940. Over the decades that followed she was lengthened, converted from steam side-wheeler to diesel motorship, and renamed the MS Mount Washington. Today she measures about 230 feet and is the flagship of the Winnipesaukee Flagship Corporation, with her home port in Laconia.
The Mount is also the lake's unofficial clock. Ice-Out, the local rite of spring, is declared when the Mount Washington can reach all of her ports of call, a definition that ties the arrival of the season to a specific hull's ability to get through the ice.
That is the peculiar charm of a Halloween cruise on this particular ship. The season is closing. The ports the Mount visits all summer are shutting down. The costume contest, the buffet, the drinks and the music are all happening aboard a vessel that has been doing this work since Ulysses S. Grant was president, in one form or another, and that will be tied up within days of the last dance.
Practical details matter for anyone planning to go. All passengers select their own seats when purchasing tickets online; there are two ticket classes, Standard and Premium. A Mariner's Club VIP upgrade, ten dollars, buys priority boarding and dedicated table service for cocktails. Photographers roam the decks selling souvenir shots. The company notes that not every bar is open on every cruise, depending on ridership, and that it is not responsible for cars ticketed at expired meters near the dock. Passengers who fall ill before sailing are asked to stay home with their whole party.
And the costume contest is the point. The Lakes Region is not a place that gets many chances to dress up. The summer is for swimsuits and boat shoes, the fall for flannel and hiking boots. A masquerade on the water, with a cash bar and a prize on the line, draws the kind of effort that a church-hall Halloween party does not. People come as pirates, as sea monsters, as the Mount herself. The judging happens somewhere out on the lake, in the dark, with the lights of Meredith and Wolfeboro sliding past.
Tickets and full details are available through Mount Washington Cruises. The boat leaves from Lakeside Avenue in Laconia on October 24, 2026. It is the last chance of the year to be aboard, and the only one that comes with a mask.