On the last night of October, the iron gates at 4900 Independence Avenue swing open after dark for ghosts, goblins, pirates and princesses. Wave Hill-O-Ween, the Riverdale garden's family Halloween evening, runs from 6 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, October 31, 2026, and it is free.
The premise is simple and a little unusual for a holiday built around porch lights and candy bowls. Instead of a haunted house, the setting is a 28-acre public garden on a wooded ridge above the Hudson River, with views across the water to the New Jersey Palisades. Families are invited to follow a garden scavenger hunt through the grounds, dance the monster mash to tunes on the lawn, stop for photographs at what the organizers call the "gourdgeous" view, and drop in on art activities inspired by the season. Treats are handed out while supplies last, though the event's own listing promises "plenty of tricks."
A few house rules keep the evening gentle. Every child, regardless of age, must be accompanied by an adult. Family and group costumes are encouraged, but super-scary costumes, fake weapons and gore that might frighten younger children are discouraged, and masks that cover the face are not allowed. Advance registration is encouraged, online or by calling 718.549.3200 x251; day-of registration depends on availability and is not guaranteed. Severe weather moves the event indoors. The Café and Shop stay open until 6 p.m.
Accessibility is addressed in unusual detail for a Halloween listing. The trail follows a variety of routes along mixed-material pathways and varying elevations, so it is not a flat loop. Wave Hill House and Armor Hall are wheelchair-accessible, with a ground-level entrance at the front of the building, a power-assist door, an all-gender ADA-compliant restroom on that level and additional ADA-compliant restrooms on the lower level reachable by elevator.
The event is young. Wave Hill's own listing for the 2025 edition described it as "back for an amazing second year," which places its debut in 2024. That first run was a shorter, afternoon-into-evening affair: the 2025 version ran 3 to 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 30, with the grounds closing at 2 p.m. so staff could get "our ghouls in place" and admission beginning at 3. It also ended in cancellation, with Wave Hill citing severe weather in its calendar notice. The 2026 edition is a tighter one-hour window on Halloween night itself, and the listing now says severe weather moves the festivities indoors rather than canceling them.
What the event borrows is the estate's long history as a place people came to escape the city. Wave Hill began in 1836, when the prominent New York attorney William Lewis Morris bought 15 acres in Riverdale, part of a wave of wealthy New Yorkers moving north as typhus, typhoid and cholera pressed in on Manhattan. The main house, Wave Hill House, was completed in 1843. The Morris family lived there until 1852, after which the property passed through other hands: the publisher William Henry Appleton bought it in 1865 and remade the house as a Victorian villa called Holbrook Hall.
In 1903 Appleton sold to George W. Perkins, a New York Life Insurance vice president and J.P. Morgan partner who had a hand in the creation of U.S. Steel. Between 1893 and 1911 Perkins assembled parcels into an estate of roughly 80 acres, adding greenhouses, terraces and a recreation building; that assemblage forms the core of today's garden. Perkins and his family settled at Glyndor, and from 1901 to 1903 he leased Wave Hill House to Mark Twain. Twain, in his mid-sixties, was known to hold tea parties in a treehouse on the back lawn, and he wrote of the spot, "I believe we have the noblest roaring blasts here I have ever known on land."
A young Theodore Roosevelt also spent time at Wave Hill, and during World War II the conductor Arturo Toscanini lived there. Toscanini had left Italy after refusing to play the Fascist anthem "Giovinezza" at La Scala in Milan, enduring surveillance and the confiscation of his passport; he reportedly left so many belongings in an upstairs closet that staff called it "Toscanini's closet." Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, was among the estate's visitors.
In 1960 the Perkins-Freeman family deeded Wave Hill to the City of New York. It was designated a New York City landmark in 1966 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, and a nonprofit organization was established in 1965 to run it. Glyndor House, built in 1927, now holds a multi-room art gallery, and the Perkins Visitor Center, originally a garage, houses the gift shop and information desk.
That is the odd charm of a Halloween here. The scavenger hunt winds past rock formations and garden beds on ground that has been a private retreat, a Gilded Age showpiece and a conductor's wartime refuge. The dancing happens on a lawn where a white-suited humorist once took tea in a tree. And the candy comes with a view of the Palisades going dark across the river. For one hour on Halloween, the gates are open and the ghouls are in place.