The Night Before Halloween is a family-friendly evening at Artmosphere Community Arts Center in Clayton, and it is built around a first: the arts center's inaugural Historic Ghost Walk. The event runs on the evening of Friday, October 30, 2026, at 3919 Raleigh Road, and one ticket price of $8 per person covers everything on the schedule.
The ghost walks are the centerpiece. Tours step off every 45 minutes beginning at 6:45 p.m. and continue until 9 p.m., which means a family can build the rest of the evening around whichever slot they choose. Around the walks, the arts center has laid out the kind of Halloween party that works for a wide range of ages: carnival-style games with prizes, snacks, a creative costume contest, and tiny pumpkin decorating with a prize for the best-decorated entry.
There is a small discrepancy in the published schedule worth knowing about. The Johnston County event listing puts the creative costume contest at 7:45 p.m. and the pumpkin-decorating prize at 8 p.m., while Artmosphere's own event page lists the costume contest at 7:30 p.m. and does not give a separate time for the pumpkin prize. Families planning to enter the contest should treat the earlier time as the safer bet and arrive with costumes ready well before 7:30.
What makes the ghost walk more than a seasonal gimmick is where it happens. Artmosphere is housed in the Walter R. and Eliza Smith Moore House, a dwelling built around 1835 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. According to the National Register nomination, it is a two-story, four-bay, single-pile vernacular Federal style heavy timber frame house, sitting on a brick foundation, sheathed in weatherboard, with a two-story front portico. A contributing meat house from roughly the same period still stands on the property. The Register's period of significance for the house is 1825 to 1849, and it was listed under the criterion of architecture.
The house sits in the Cleveland community of Clayton, and Artmosphere describes its grounds as 6.75 acres with gardens. The arts center opened there in 2018, with a stated purpose of building relationships within the community using the arts as a bridge. It runs workshops, classes, a clay studio, music lessons, a gallery, an interactive community garden and event space, and it hosts annual free outdoor community events with live music and artisan vendors. Its main building is open Tuesday through Saturday, closed Sundays and Mondays.
That setting is what gives the ghost walk its material. A house that has stood through nearly two centuries of Johnston County history, with an outbuilding from the same era and a family name attached to it, offers a natural spine for the kind of stories a curated historical walk tells, and the arts center is framing the tours as history rather than a haunted house. The event page calls them "Historic Ghost Walk" tours and notes this is the first year the center has offered them.
For anyone weighing the cost, the single $8 ticket is the whole proposition: games, snacks, prizes, the costume contest, the pumpkin decorating and a ghost walk slot are all included, with no separate charge listed for individual activities. The event is open to all ages, and the listing notes no reserved seating or capacity cap, so walk-up attendance is the expectation rather than advance booking.
A few practical notes. The address, 3919 Raleigh Road, is the same as the historic house's National Register address, so GPS directions to the arts center and to the Moore House lead to the same place. The venue's regular hours do not apply on event evenings; the center notes that alternative hours may be offered for classes, workshops and special events. Because the ghost walks run in 45-minute increments until 9 p.m., arriving earlier in the evening leaves room for games and pumpkin decorating before a later tour, while arriving close to 6:45 p.m. suits families with younger children who want to be home before dark.
Artmosphere's own description of the night is enthusiastic and unpretentious: "Come One Come All!!!" the listing reads, with an invitation to wear a creative costume. For a community arts center that has spent its years since 2018 turning a nearly 200-year-old house into a place for classes, clay and gallery shows, Halloween is a natural fit, and the first Historic Ghost Walk is a chance to hear the house's history told out loud on its own grounds.