The house at 801 Arsenal Avenue was built by a Poe, but not that Poe. Edgar Allan "E.A." Poe was a Fayetteville brickmaker, businessman, and civic leader who raised eight children with his wife, Josephine Montague Poe, in the Victorian gingerbread home he built between 1896 and 1898. Locals have called him "E.A." for more than a century, largely to keep him from being confused with the author of "The Raven," who died in 1849 and never set foot in Cumberland County. The irony that a man who made his fortune in brick built his own house of wood is one of the details guides like to point out on the regular daytime tours.
For four nights this October, that confusion becomes the joke. The Museum of the Cape Fear Historical Complex will open the 1897 Poe House after dark for "Hallowe'en Revels: Haints & Diversions," an immersive, family-friendly living history experience that turns the old home into a period Halloween party. Tours run October 16 and 17 and again October 29 and 30, from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m., with the last group stepping off at 9:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 per person and are sold in timed slots on Eventbrite; the museum asks guests to note the start time on their ticket, because late arrivals cannot be admitted once a group has entered the house.
Inside, actors from Sweet Tea Shakespeare, the Fayetteville classical theater company, portray historical figures at a Victorian-era Halloween gathering. Guests move room to room through short scripted and improvised vignettes built around the games, ghost stories, fortune-telling, and folk beliefs that would have filled an early twentieth-century Halloween. The subject matter includes magic, witches, ghosts, and some historically rooted religious themes, so the museum flags it as a conversation starter rather than a scare. Each tour runs about 45 minutes and requires participants to stand throughout and to climb and descend a flight of stairs; groups are kept small because the house is tight on space.
The event is not a one-off stunt. It is the Halloween half of "History Live," a seasonal series the museum runs in partnership with its nonprofit support group, the Museum of the Cape Fear Historical Complex Foundation, Inc. The Arts Council of Fayetteville/Cumberland County awarded the foundation a $15,000 grant to underwrite the series, which pairs the ticketed night tours in October and December with free, single-day community events. The North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, also supports the programming. Museum educator Mary Cooper has described the series as a way to "share our local history with the community in fun and engaging ways."
The Revels have evolved under that umbrella. Earlier iterations carried titles like "Poetry and Prophecy" and "Seance and Secrets," each built around a different scripted short play staged in the actual rooms of the house. The 2024 version, "Poetry and Prophecy," ran five nights and capped each group at 15 people. The format has stayed deliberately gentle: the museum has consistently described the tours as a non-scary glimpse into how Halloween used to be celebrated, distinct from the standard daytime tour that covers the Poe family, women's roles, African American history, and the technological and social changes sweeping southern North Carolina in the decades around 1900.
There is a second, larger Halloween tradition on the same grounds. "Trick or Treat at the 1897 Poe House," a free daytime event for children 12 and under, has grown over several years to more than 1,000 guests, filling the house with vintage carnival games, a dance party, magic shows, and hayrides in Arsenal Park. The Revels are the grown-up, after-dark counterpart, and the setting carries its own atmosphere. The museum complex sits on the site of the Fayetteville Arsenal, constructed between 1838 and 1856 as one of five U.S. arsenals commissioned after the War of 1812. Union troops under General William T. Sherman destroyed the arsenal in 1865; today only fragments of its foundation and a surviving "ghost tower" remain in the park beside the house.
That combination, a Victorian home, a ruined arsenal, and a theater company willing to play ghosts, is what makes the Revels unusual among Fayetteville's fall offerings. It is also cheap by the standards of seasonal attractions: $10 buys roughly 45 minutes inside a house most visitors only ever see through glass on a guided daytime walk. The Poe House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 and is part of the Museum of the Cape Fear Historical Complex, which also includes a regional history museum and the Arsenal Park grounds.
Sweet Tea Shakespeare, founded and led by Jeremy Fiebig, a professor of theater and directing at Fayetteville State University, has become the museum's regular collaborator for these productions, appearing at the Poe House for Halloween programming and again for December's Holiday Jubilee. The company performs across the region, including Shakespeare in Raleigh, Sanford, and Elizabethtown, but the Poe House work is a different discipline: no stage, no lights to speak of, and an audience standing inches away in a family's former parlor.
For anyone planning to go, the practical details matter. Performances are October 16, 17, 29, and 30, 2026, from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m., with the final tour beginning at 9:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 and can be pre-purchased on Eventbrite. Participants should expect to stand for the full 45 minutes and to manage a staircase. The museum recommends arriving at least 15 minutes before the ticketed time. And it is worth remembering, walking up the steps of a house decorated for a Victorian Halloween, that the Poe who lived here made bricks, not nightmares, and that the ghost stories told inside are the ones his neighbors would have told each other.