If you've never been inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at night with the lights down, I need you to understand something: it is already the most Halloween building in New York City on a random Tuesday afternoon. Add a live organ, a 1920s silent horror film, and actors in costume processing through the crowd in the dark, and you have an event that does not need a single fog machine or plastic skeleton to be terrifying.
Last year I went to the cathedral's Halloween Extravaganza and I have not stopped talking about it since. They screen the 1920s silent film version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, live, with organist David Briggs playing the score on the cathedral's actual organ. If you've never heard a pipe organ at full volume inside a Gothic cathedral while a black and white monster movie plays above you, there is nothing else in this city like it.
Then it gets better. Once the film ends, the Mettawee River Theater Company shows up in costume and processes through the entire audience and out into the night. You're not watching a performance, you're suddenly standing in the middle of one, in the dark, in a cathedral.
I filmed a bit of it on my phone that night and posted it to TikTok. It ended up getting way more views than I expected, I think because nobody believes this is a real thing you can do in New York until they see it.
Both performances this year, tonight at 7pm and tomorrow at 7pm, are completely sold out. No wait list, no standby line. If you didn't get a ticket, I'm sorry, and also: start setting a calendar reminder now for next year, because tickets for this one disappear fast.
Watch my video from last year on TikTok →
Perimenopause has made me chase more of these moments lately, the ones that pull you fully into your body and out of your head for an hour. Standing in a 600-year-feeling building while actors walk past you in the dark does that in a way almost nothing else does. Worth the planning ahead for next Halloween.