Halloween at Cacapon Resort State Park has never been a one-hour affair. On October 31, 2026, the park's nature center will run a program that stretches from mid-morning pumpkin carving to a haunted hayride after dark, a schedule that has become something of a local tradition in Morgan County — one that borrows the park's own landscape, its cabins, and its campfire rings as stage sets.
The day begins at 10 a.m. with a pumpkin carving contest at the nature center. Pumpkins are provided on a first come, first serve basis, and awards go out in three categories: scariest, traditional, and nature based. That last category is the tell. This is a state park event, and even the jack-o'-lanterns are expected to answer to the woods.
From noon to 3:30 p.m., hayrides leave the nature center every twenty minutes for the North Fork cabin area, billed as a chance to take in the fall colors. The North Fork cabin area is not incidental scenery. It is part of the park's historic core, the cluster of structures laid out in the 1930s when Cacapon was carved out of the mountainside, and it appears by name on the park's layout plans from that era. Riding a hay wagon up to those cabins in late October is, in a quiet way, a tour of the park's oldest built history dressed up as a fall outing.
Then, from 7 to 9 p.m., the tone changes entirely. The haunted hayrides run around the nature center circle, with Halloween candy and scares along the route. Riders get a glowstick bracelet or necklace, and a campfire with marshmallows waits at the end for anyone who needs to thaw out or settle their nerves. Costumes are encouraged.
The nature center itself has a history worth knowing before you stand in line outside it. It opened in 2002 in what had been the living and working heart of the Civilian Conservation Corps camp — the same camp whose crews, working with the state of West Virginia in 1934, created Cacapon State Park out of 6,000 acres on the eastern slope of Cacapon Mountain. Those CCC workers built the park's original 11-room log inn in the wide glen on the mountain's east side, along with a dam and lake, a bathhouse, a beach, picnic sites, and rental cabins. A 50-room lodge with a restaurant and banquet hall followed in 1956 and was expanded in 1999; an 18-hole golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr. arrived in 1973, the year the park became a full-fledged resort. Today there are 31 rental cabins.
So the ground under the pumpkin contest is ground that CCC crews worked nearly a century ago, and the hayride route passes buildings those crews put up. The park's name comes from the mountain and the nearby Cacapon River; it is generally traced to a Shawnee word for "medicine," and locals will tell you it is pronounced Ca-cay-pun. Cacapon Mountain runs north to south through Morgan County, ending at Panorama Overlook in the north and reaching the county's highest point, 2,320 feet, at its southern end.
The Halloween program is not new. In 2024, the Morgan Messenger reported on visitors and locals of all ages turning out on Saturday, October 26 for a picturesque autumn day that included a pumpkin carving contest at the nature center pavilion, haunted hayrides to the middle fork cabins, and a spooky campfire with marshmallows, with glowsticks and bracelets handed out. The paper noted that Halloween candy and decorations that year were provided by The Seely Foundation. A 2025 edition followed the same shape: carving during the day, fall hayrides out of the nature center, and haunted hayrides with a campfire from 7 to 9 p.m.
What changes year to year is mostly the calendar. In 2025 the park held its Halloween Weekend on October 25. For 2026 the date falls on Halloween itself, Saturday, October 31, which means the haunted hayrides will run on the night the holiday actually belongs to. The park lists the event as running 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Practical details are thin beyond the schedule, and that appears to be the point: the state parks listing does not mention tickets, reservations, or an admission fee, describing the day simply as activities at the nature center. The one hard limit stated is on the pumpkins, which are first come, first serve — so carvers who want their pick of gourds should arrive early. The park asks hayride riders to line up at the nature center, and given that wagons leave every twenty minutes through the afternoon, the line is part of the experience.
Cacapon sits about 15 miles south of Berkeley Springs, the Morgan County seat, on a long strip of land that runs from just below the Potomac River — the Maryland line — south to the Virginia state line. The park is bordered on the west by Cacapon Mountain, most of which lies inside its boundaries. In late October that geography does a lot of work: the mountain holds the color, the cabins give the hayride a destination, and the nature center, built on the old CCC camp, gives the whole thing a place to start and end.
For families in Berkeley Springs, Paw Paw, Hancock, and the wider Eastern Panhandle, it has become a reliable ritual — the kind of event where the same people show up year after year, carve a pumpkin in the morning, ride out to the cabins in the afternoon, and come back after dark to be scared by their neighbors. The park's own instructions are simple: costumes encouraged, line up at the nature center, and don't forget the marshmallows.