On the last Saturday in October, the gangway onto the 1885 tall ship Wavertree will be crowded with pirates, ghosts and at least a few small sailors. The South Street Seaport Museum's Halloween celebration runs from 11am to 5pm on October 31, 2026, and the centerpiece is a spooky scavenger hunt staged across the decks of the museum's flagship — a wrought-iron cargo ship that has been tied up at Pier 16 for more than half a century and is, by any measure, the largest object the museum owns.
The premise of the hunt is a good one for a ship like this. Visitors follow clues through the vessel to collect a set of sailors' superstitions, and turn in a full set for a treat. It is a scavenger hunt that doubles as a small lesson in the folklore of the age of sail, which is roughly what the museum has been doing since it was founded in 1967 to preserve and interpret New York's history as a great port city.
General admission to the museum is free for the day, which means the ship, the galleries at 12 Fulton Street and the museum's working 19th-century print shop are all open without a ticket. Wavertree is normally open Wednesday through Sunday from 11am to 5pm, with the last boarding at 4:30pm; on Halloween the ship is the setting for the hunt rather than a straight tour.
From 11am to 4pm, Pier 16 hosts the Healthful Halloween Fair with Mommy Poppins, the New York City family-activity site. Families can drop in for Halloween-inspired crafts and free samples of healthy treats — an attempt, presumably, to put something with nutritional value into children before the candy portion of the day begins. At 2pm the fair gives way to a costume parade, with prizes on offer for the best-dressed.
Then from 3pm to 5pm the celebration spills out of the museum and into the neighborhood. Trick-or-treating across the Seaport involves dozens of businesses, from the Seaport Museum itself to McNally Jackson, Paris Cafe, Mister Dips, the Fulton, Kee's Chocolates, the Cobble Fish and the 33 Hotel, among many others. Treat bags are the order of the hour; the full roster of participating storefronts is posted by the Seaport district.
Preregistration is encouraged, though walk-ups will be accommodated as space allows. That is worth knowing, because the ship has finite deck space and the museum's own guidance for Wavertree tours is that advance registration guarantees a spot while walk-ups depend on the crowd.
The ship at the center of all this has a story that suits Halloween better than most. Wavertree was built in 1885 at Woolston, Southampton, by Oswald, Mordaunt and Company, one of the last large sailing ships constructed of wrought iron before steel took over. She was launched as Southgate — the name Toxteth appears in the builders' correspondence — and was renamed Wavertree two years later when R. W. Leyland & Company of Liverpool took her over, taking the name from a district of that city.
Her first trade was jute, carried between eastern India, now Bangladesh, and Scotland, for rope and burlap. She soon moved into the tramp trades, taking whatever cargo would pay to wherever it was going. In 1910, after a 24-year sailing career, she was caught in a storm off Cape Horn that tore down her masts and ended her life as a cargo carrier. Her owners did not re-rig her. They sold her to become a floating warehouse at Punta Arenas, Chile, and she was later converted into a sand barge in South America, where the waterfront workers called her "el gran Valero" — the great sailing ship — because even stripped of her masts she was unmistakably a ship.
She survived because her hull was sound. Where many of her sisters were lost to gales, sinkings or the scrap yard, Wavertree was repurposed twice and then, at the end of her useful life in those roles, was found in time. The museum bought her in 1968, and she arrived in New York in 1970 in a parade of fireboats, tugs and ferries, 75 years after she had first come into the port carrying nitrate from Chile. In 1978 she was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2015 the museum was awarded a $13 million, city-funded grant for an unprecedented restoration, and the ship returned to Pier 16 rebuilt and reopened to the public.
What visitors climb aboard on Halloween is therefore both a genuine artifact of the 19th-century cargo trade and something of a resurrection. The main deck has been restored to show the forecastle where the crew bunked, the galley where meals were cooked, the saloon that served as the captain's living room and the ship's office in port, and the quarterdeck where visitors can take the wheel and learn about the capstan. Below is the vast cargo hold that carried bulk goods on her voyages around the world.
It is a strange and rather wonderful place to send children hunting for sailors' superstitions. The men who sailed ships like this one had a deep and practical vocabulary of bad luck — things not to say, names not to speak, winds that meant trouble — and a scavenger hunt that asks kids to collect them is a reminder that the ship was, for its crew, a workplace full of rules that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with fear.
The day runs rain or shine, as museum programming generally does, and the whole of it — the ship, the fair, the parade, the candy — is free. For a family looking for a Halloween that involves something more than a pillowcase of candy, a 141-year-old iron ship on the East River is a hard thing to beat.