This October, for one night, the Cape Fear Museum will point visitors toward the sky. Cape FearFUL Skies, an adults-only Halloween program on October 23, 2026, takes visitors into the museum's brand-new planetarium for a live, educator-led tour of the night sky, dressed up with spooks, surprises and a costumed audience. The museum stays open extra late, until 8:30 p.m.
The show is included with regular museum admission, but seats must be reserved for a specific time slot. That detail matters more than it might seem. The planetarium dome holds 58 people per show, and the museum's own schedule warns that planetarium tickets sell out fast — reservations open two hours before showtime, and visitors are advised to claim seats early. For this program, the museum asks guests to check its calendar for additional dates and times.
The format borrows from the museum's long-running Cape Fear Skies program, the live star tour it offers on Thursday and Saturday afternoons. In the standard version, a museum educator walks visitors through what is actually visible from their own backyards, how to identify celestial objects, and what is happening in the sky right now, mixing in star stories before the dome lifts off into the wider universe. Cape FearFUL Skies keeps that structure — a tour of the sky from Earth, then a flight outward — and bends it toward Halloween. Costumes are encouraged. Masks and weapons are not. The museum notes that the show is for ages 18 and over and contains flashing lights. Families are not left out: a family-friendly version is scheduled for Halloween Day itself, with showings at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
The setting is the story here. The planetarium is the centerpiece of the Cape Fear Museum's new Grace Street campus, which opened on August 18, 2026, after what museum director Kate Baillon described to WECT as a 10-year planning and construction journey. "It has taken a long time to get here," Baillon said. "We have prepared all through that time, all through the starts and stops and ups and downs of the project. The museum has kept going and kept planning because it really does take that long to create something like this."
The new building more than doubles the museum's exhibit space and triples its educational space, according to WECT. Alongside the planetarium are five exhibit areas: Cape Fear Stories, a two-floor interactive history of the region; Science Matters, a hands-on science gallery; Port City Play, a children's space; Curious Nature, an outdoor terrace focused on local ecosystems; and a 5,000-square-foot changing gallery currently hosting Amazing Pollinators, a game-based exhibition on view through January 2027. More than 400 artifacts are on display. The planetarium itself is a 60-seat digital dome — the museum's show schedule lists 58 seats per show — with projection technology meant to carry audiences from familiar constellations out to the edge of the solar system and back again, and it carries the name nCino Planetarium after its presenting sponsor.
One practical note for anyone planning around the original listing: the Cape FearFUL Skies event page still gives the museum's address as 814 Market Street, but that is no longer where visitors go. The museum's site now describes the Grace Street campus as its open visitor facility and the Market Street location as its collections and research facility. The Market Street campus remains part of the museum system — Baillon told WECT it would continue to operate and house a larger research operation — and there is a park there as well. But the planetarium, the galleries and this Halloween show are at 230 Grace Street in downtown Wilmington.
That the museum is staging a Halloween planetarium night at all is a small departure worth noticing. The institution has moved around the city repeatedly, accumulating collections, photographs and oral histories, and for decades it has been as much a science museum as a history one. A dome full of costumed adults learning to find constellations above their own backyards is a fairly natural next step for an institution that has spent more than a century explaining the place it sits in — including, now, the sky over it.
Cape FearFUL Skies runs October 23, 2026, at the Cape Fear Museum's Grace Street campus, 230 Grace Street, Wilmington. Admission is included with museum entry; time-slot reservations are required and can be made at the front desk when purchasing admission. The museum is open until 8:30 p.m. for the program. Guests are encouraged to dress up, leave masks and weapons at home, and note that the show is 18+ and includes flashing lights.