For three days in late October, the Washington State Fair & Events Center in Puyallup trades blue-ribbon pumpkins and rodeo dirt for something considerably darker. The third annual Washington State Horror Con runs October 23 through 25, 2026, and its organizers bill it without hedging as the Pacific Northwest's largest celebrity horror convention. The guest list makes the case: Ric Flair, The Godfather, The Walking Dead's Lauren Cohan and Emily Kinney, Stranger Things' Brett Gelman and Matthew Modine, Shawnee Smith of Saw, Doug Jones of Hellboy, E.T.'s Dee Wallace and Henry Thomas, A Nightmare on Elm Street's Jackie Earle Haley, and the Terrifier crew led by David Howard Thornton, the man behind Art the Clown, alongside director Damien Leone.
That roster is an odd, appealing mix, and the oddness is the point. A wrestling legend sharing a convention floor with the star of a splatter franchise and the mom from E.T. is exactly the kind of collision that horror fandom has always produced. Horror conventions have never been fussy about genre borders; they grew out of the same fan culture that produced the monster-movie matinees, the drive-ins, and the late-night creature features, and the modern version is less a curated film festival than a family reunion for people who like being scared.
The event's own origin story is a little unusual. It did not begin as a scrappy, fan-run gathering that slowly grew. It was launched as an extension of an existing show. An archived version of the convention's website from May 2024 announced it plainly: the new event would "launch Summer Con's version of a horror convention," with the first edition set for October 25-27, 2024, at the same fairgrounds. In other words, the people behind Summer Con -- the fairgrounds' warm-weather pop-culture convention -- looked at their existing audience and their existing venue and decided the Pacific Northwest needed a Halloween-season sibling. The first show arrived in 2024, the second in 2025, and the 2026 edition is the third, which is why the marketing now carries the phrase "3rd Annual" with some confidence.
That lineage explains a lot about how the con is built. It behaves like a convention that already knows what it is doing. Panels for 2026 will be held in a new Pavilion Auditorium filling the second floor of the Pavilion, with 45- to 50-minute sessions, the center section cleared between panels, and queuing for the bigger draws. VIP and ADA seating will be set aside. The gaming area is not an afterthought: 9,000 square feet of video and tabletop gaming sits on the Pavilion's first floor behind Artist Alley. There is a horror-themed car show, professional photo ops, and more than 200 vendors and artists.
The celebrity mechanics are worth knowing before you go, because they are not included in admission. Guests sit at designated booths across the three days, and autographs, table photos (selfies), and even video or voice recordings are purchased at the show rather than pre-sold online. You can bring your own item to be signed, though every guest reserves the right to decline something they find objectionable. Professional photo ops are sold separately and, for 2026, were slated to go on sale the week of August 31. Guest announcements were still rolling out into October, and the convention is upfront that announced guests are under contract but that personal appearances come second to professional commitments -- and that admission tickets will not be refunded if a celebrity cancels.
Tickets are on sale now and are date-specific and non-refundable. Adult tickets cover ages 13 and up; child tickets cover ages 4 through 12, and the supply of child tickets is limited, after which adult tickets must be purchased. Admission is by QR code scanned at the door and exchanged for a show badge; badges are not mailed. Purchases carry a 5% City of Puyallup admission tax. Parking is free in the Blue Lot, with entry through the Blue Gate.
The hours reward planning. Friday, October 23 runs 2 to 8 p.m., a shorter, evening-weighted session that tends to suit locals ducking out of work. Saturday, October 24 is the long one, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and will be the busiest. Sunday, October 25 closes things out from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. VIP badge holders get in 30 minutes before show hours each day, which matters most on Saturday.
There is something fitting about the setting. The Washington State Fair & Events Center is a place built for crowds and spectacle, with barns and grandstands and acres of asphalt, and it has spent more than a century hosting the state's most wholesome annual gathering. For one weekend in October, the same grounds host a man in a clown costume who has become one of the most recognizable horror figures of his generation. Puyallup, a city on the river about ten miles southeast of Tacoma and thirty-five miles south of Seattle, is an easy drive for most of the Puget Sound region, which is presumably part of why the show landed there and stayed.
And the guest list keeps a door open for the future. The convention's contact page includes a form inviting fans to request specific guests for coming years, asking them to name the movies or shows that connect that person to the genre. It is a small thing, but it says something about how this con sees itself: not as a fixed product handed down from on high, but as a thing shaped by the people who buy the tickets. For a show that started as a spinoff and is now in its third year, that seems like a reasonable way to keep growing.