The vendor at 25th and Sheridan is still setting up folding tables under the last warm Thursday light, tomatoes going soft at the edges the way they do in late September, while a few blocks away a crew preps a building that spends most of the year looking like nothing at all. By the time the market packs its last table on October 2, that building will already be open for its thirtieth season, drawing a very different Zion crowd after dark.
People who don't live here assume Zion goes quiet once the produce stands fold up for the year. It doesn't. The market's closing date and the haunted house's opening date sit six days apart on the calendar, and for most of that week both are running at the same time, on the same stretch of road.
Two Calendars, One Boulevard
The Zion Farmers Market runs Thursdays from 2 to 7 p.m. along the boulevard at 25th and Sheridan, a season that started June 19 and wraps October 2. That's the only true closing date on the fall calendar here. Everything else is either just getting started or already underway.
The Dungeon of Doom Haunted House opens for its 2026 season on September 26, six days before the market wraps for the year, and runs through December 12. It's not new. The attraction has been running since 1997, which puts this at its thirtieth season, and its own site describes it as one of the longest-running haunted attractions in the country. Inside, the walkthrough runs close to an hour with nearly 100 live actors moving through the sets. The building sits at 600 29th Street, with parking routed off 27th via Shiloh Boulevard, close enough to the market's stretch of Sheridan that both events share the same general end of town for one overlapping week.
Here's how the two run against each other:
| Event | 2026 Dates | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Zion Farmers Market | June 19 – Oct. 2, Thursdays 2-7 p.m. | 25th & Sheridan |
| Dungeon of Doom Haunted House | Sept. 26 – Dec. 12 | 600 29th St. |
| Great Pumpkin Hunt | Oct. 7 | Shiloh Center |
| Trail of Treats | Oct. 30, 4-6 p.m. | Shiloh Park |
Read that table left to right and the pattern is a handoff, not a gap. By the time the market's season ends, the haunted house has already been open for the better part of a week, and two more dated events land before Halloween itself.
What A Closing Date Actually Means Here
A market closing on October 2 sounds like the end of something. In most towns it would be. Here it's closer to a shift change. The same corridor that hosted produce stalls all summer starts hosting a costumed staff of nearly 100 within days, and the Zion Park District has its own fall programming stacked on top of that, independent of whether the market is running or not.
The Great Pumpkin Hunt returns to Shiloh Center on October 7, five days after the market's last day of the season. Trail of Treats, the park district's annual event, runs at Shiloh Park on October 30 from 4 to 6 p.m. Neither of those needs the market to still be open. They were never on the same schedule to begin with. What changes on October 2 isn't the town's outdoor activity. It's just which one of the two calendars a Thursday afternoon on Sheridan belongs to.
The Building That's Been Doing This For Thirty Years
Most Halloween attractions don't last three decades. The Dungeon of Doom has, and the arithmetic on that is worth sitting with for a second: a haunted house that opened its doors the same year plenty of current Zion homeowners were still in grade school is now running its thirtieth consecutive season a few blocks from a farmers market boulevard that's been running since June. That's not a pop-up. That's infrastructure, the kind that shows up on a town's fall calendar every year without anyone having to wonder if it's coming back.
The scale of what's inside matches the tenure. A walkthrough pushing close to an hour, staffed by close to 100 live actors, is a bigger operation than the phrase "haunted house" usually implies. It's also close enough to the boulevard that anyone who spent September walking past market tables at 25th and Sheridan is within a short drive of the same footprint once October starts.
Shiloh Park's Older Rhythm
Not everything on this stretch of Zion runs on a Halloween clock. Shiloh House, the 25-room mansion built in 1901 by Zion's founder, Rev. John Alexander Dowie, sits inside the same general Shiloh Park footprint and keeps its own pace entirely. It now serves as the headquarters of the Zion Historical Society, and it's open for public tours on Sundays, a schedule that hasn't changed for the season and won't. Where the haunted house draws its crowd after dark for three months, Shiloh House draws a quieter one on a fixed weekly rhythm that predates the Dungeon of Doom by nearly a century.
That contrast is part of what makes the boulevard's fall interesting rather than repetitive. The same park district that runs Trail of Treats also maintains Shiloh Park Golf Course at 23rd and Bethesda Boulevard, and the city has a second public course at Shepherd's Crook on Green Bay Road. None of that stops for Halloween. A golfer teeing off on a Saturday morning in October is on the same park system calendar as the trick-or-treaters who'll fill the same grounds that evening.
The Beach Season Closes The Same Week
One more date lines up with the market's October 2 close, and it's easy to miss. Camping season at Illinois Beach State Park runs May 1 through September 30, which means the campground closes two days before the farmers market does. The park itself, 6.5 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, doesn't shut down. But the camping calendar and the market calendar end within 48 hours of each other, right as the Halloween calendar is already a week into its run.
Three different parts of Zion's outdoor life, a lakefront campground, a produce market, and a Halloween attraction, are all keeping their own separate schedules that happen to cross paths in the same first week of October. None of them were built around the others. They just land close enough together that the switch from one season to the next doesn't feel like a switch at all. It feels like the same town changing which door it's using.
That's the part worth knowing if you've only ever clocked Zion by its property tax rate or its median price. The town runs on its own internal calendar, one that doesn't pause between summer and fall so much as hand off cleanly, week to week, boulevard to park to shoreline.
If you're weighing a move to a Lake County community with a fall calendar this specific, or you already live along the Shiloh corridor and want a read on what a home here is actually worth this season, Deena Allie knows this stretch of Zion well enough to walk you through both.
