❤️ What's happening this weekend in the 757

Good morning, 757!

Halloween lands on a Saturday this year. Then at 2 a.m. Sunday the clocks fall back and hand you an extra hour on top of it. That is a 25-hour weekend, which is the closest thing to free money this region gets without a toll booth being involved.

So here is how we would spend it. If you have a kid and a dollar in your pocket, start with the haunted carousel in Hampton, because a dollar really is the whole price and it runs till 8 p.m., so it works for a seven-year-old as well as a toddler. If you work Saturdays like a lot of this list does, Sunday is the strong day this week, and you get the extra hour too. And if you moved here sometime this year and a Halloween weekend feels like a wall of other people's traditions, skip to Every Week near the bottom. That part is not about this weekend at all.

One piece of geography, because about half of this list sits across water from the other half. Hampton, Newport News, Williamsburg, Yorktown, Poquoson and James City County are the Peninsula, and from the Southside they cost you time but no money: the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel and the Monitor-Merrimac are both free, and the full weekend closure VDOT had penciled in at the HRBT for Friday night through Monday was canceled on October 18, so this is a normal drive. Portsmouth is the one that costs. The Downtown and Midtown tunnels bill weekends at the off-peak rate, $2.42 each way with an E-ZPass or $7.25 if you get billed by plate, and the only toll-free highway crossing is the High Rise Bridge on I-64 well down in Chesapeake, which is a long way around. If you live in Portsmouth or Norfolk and earn under $50,000, VDOT's toll relief program covers up to 14 crossings a week at no charge, and the wider region qualifies for half off under $65,000. It needs a Virginia E-ZPass and an in-person application with proof of income and address.

Here's what we've got:

Let's get to it.

— Josh

🎠 Haunted Horse Rides at the Hampton Carousel turn the 1920 carousel on the Hampton waterfront spooky from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and a ride costs a dollar. Sunday is the last day of the run.

🎃 Hickory Ridge Farm's pumpkin patch on Battlefield Boulevard in Chesapeake is open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday, and then it shuts for the year. Walking in and parking are free, the kids' play area is $8.50 with adults free, and pumpkins are 99 cents a pound. Go early Saturday if you want a parking spot.

🎭 The Play That Goes Wrong has the Williamsburg Players staging the farce where a country-house murder mystery collapses around its own cast. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., $12 students and kids, $22 adults.

📚 Recycled Reads fills the Slover's first floor with the Friends of the Norfolk Public Library's annual sale, Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Hardcovers $3, paperbacks $2, and Saturday is bargain day.

🌟 Lumi SkyWalk's Halloween show lights up the treetop walk at Owl Creek Landing in Virginia Beach, 7 to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday only. $13 ages 3 to 6, $18 ages 7 to 13, $23 for 14 and up, on timed entry.

⚓ The Haunted Lightship opens up the Lightship Portsmouth Museum for a walk-through, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday and Saturday, free, with food donations encouraged. Saturday is the last date, and from Norfolk the free part ends at the tunnel booth.

Members of the Hill family and assorted Portsmouth notables come back from the grave to deliver monologues on every floor of their own house. One night only, five dollars, and it lines up with the Olde Towne Ghost Walk if you want to make an evening of it.

The sixth annual, with DJ Showtime and DJ Almighty Shawty, and a NorVa crowd that treats a Halloween costume as a competitive event.

If you live in Portsmouth, bring a photo ID and five city museums let you in free for the day: the Children's Museum of Virginia, the Naval Shipyard Museum, the Lightship, the Art and Cultural Center, and the Colored Community Library Museum. If you don't live there, this one isn't yours, and the Hill House above is.

Before the listings, the one Halloween fact worth having: trick-or-treating ends at 8 p.m., and that is actual city code rather than a suggestion in Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Hampton, Newport News, Portsmouth and Suffolk, which also cap the age at 12, or 14 in Chesapeake. Williamsburg, James City County and York County recommend 6 to 8 p.m. instead. No city sets an official start time, so heading out at dusk is custom and not a rule, and a parent walking with a kid is exempt everywhere.

The last of five October Saturdays on a farm whose land has been worked since 1630. Six hours of it, and then the gate closes for the year.

Twenty-four local authors selling and signing, plus a three-sentence horror story contest at 1 p.m. for adults and 1:30 for kids 8 to 11.

Trunk or treat in the Coliseum parking lot with race cars from Langley Speedway, fire trucks and police cars to climb on, and candy for the taking.

The American Theatre runs it with their own shadow cast, which is the only way it's worth watching. Halloween night, fifteen dollars, parking included.

The Happier Now tour lands on Halloween night with Balance and Composure, Midrift and Niis. All ages, and a NorVa crowd on Halloween dresses for it properly.

Sketch and improv from Push Comedy Theater's creepy clowns, demons and ghouls, which is a sentence their own listing wrote and we are not going to improve on. Wear a costume and they take $5 off the ticket.

An hour through the Chrysler's Baroque rooms with someone who can tell you why any of it was painted. Sunday afternoon is also when the museum is at its quietest.

Two hours through the ViBe district's murals and workshops, led by somebody who actually lives in it. First Sunday of the month, and if the time change has your household up at six anyway, a 2 p.m. start is forgiving.

A Fleetwood Mac sing-along where the audience is the choir. They teach, you sing, no experience necessary, which makes it one of the few tickets in this issue that's easier to buy for one than for four.

A ranger walks you down to a fossil beach on the York River to dig for things that were alive six million years ago. Kids welcome, nobody has to sign up.

Send the carousel line to whoever is out of ideas for a kid this weekend, and send the Fleetwood Mac sing-along to the one friend who will absolutely sing all of Rumours in a theater full of strangers.

Things that run on a standing schedule, so they'll still be here after this weekend is over. Two of this week's three are monthly rather than weekly, which is thinner than we want, and the section is short on anything that isn't a jam or a trail. If you run a standing thing that isn't in a taproom, reply and tell us, because that is genuinely how this section gets better.

🦆 Weyanoke Sanctuary bird walk meets the third Saturday of each month at 8 a.m. at the sanctuary entrance on Armistead Bridge Road in West Ghent, Norfolk, and runs about an hour. Cape Henry Audubon leads it, you bring nothing, and an hour is a genuinely low bar for a Saturday. Next one is Saturday, November 21.

🪕 Tidewater Bluegrass Society jam meets the last Tuesday of the month, 2 to 4 p.m., at Williamsburg Community Chapel on John Tyler Highway. Any instrument, any level, and the society tags this one "active" on its own jam list. Next one is Tuesday, November 24.

📷 Hampton Roads Digital Photography Club meets at 6:30 p.m. at the Northampton Community Center on Todds Lane in Hampton, most Tuesdays rather than every one, so read the date off their calendar. Next up is an evening with Glen McClure on Tuesday, November 17. Dues are $25 a year for an individual, $35 for a household, with a 30-day free trial.

🌯 Chipotle opened in York County on Monday morning, unlocking the doors at 10:45 a.m. on George Washington Memorial Highway under a manager who spent three years running a Richmond store.

🎭 Norfolk's Generic Theater got its occupancy permit for the Masonic Temple on Granby Street, which took about 100 volunteers and more than $200,000 in donations to reach.

🍎 Tashir Rushing of Big Bethel KinderCare in Hampton won KinderCare's national teacher of the year award, one of 25 chosen out of 40,000 teachers, for an after-school classroom built around letting kids pick what they do.

🚜 Norfolk ran its snowplow drivers through a cone course in October, in the parking lot by the shuttered Military Circle Mall, teaching new operators how to get a plow down the city's narrow older streets.

🎁 The Salvation Army's Angel Tree drive opened with a sponsor breakfast in the old Sears on Greenbrier Parkway, aiming at gifts for nearly 12,000 local kids.

Thank you for reading The 757 Current!

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— Josh