How Communities Impacted by Hurricanes Helene and Milton Are Celebrating Halloween

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Krista Gamble and her family love Halloween. But this year, as her community in Asheville, North Carolina, was still dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene—a category 4 storm that ravaged the city last month—she wanted to make sure that families in the area would be able to enjoy the holiday.

“It’s traumatizing a lot of the things some of these kids have seen or learned,” Gamble says about Helene. “It’s important to let these kids still be kids; they’ve had a tough month.”

Helene reached Florida on Sept. 26 and tore through the Southeast. The storm devastated western North Carolina—almost half of deaths due to Helene were in North Carolina, and 42 were in Buncombe County where Asheville is located, according to The Associated Press. Less than two weeks later, Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida as a Category 3 hurricane, wreaking havoc on communities that had just begun to recover from Helene. Officials are still calculating the damage from the two storms, but it’s estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars.

Gamble says she and her family were fortunate that they only had minimal flooding in their basement, but they were left without power and running water for a couple weeks after Helene hit. Gamble says much of Asheville is still under a boil water notice as of Tuesday. But as the community has embarked on rebuilding and cleanup efforts, people like Gamble have also been coming together to help each other find moments of levity—like by celebrating Halloween.

North Carolina celebrates Halloween despite Helene

After Helene, Gamble started collecting donations of Halloween costumes and ended up bringing about 150 of them to a local community space in Asheville, which held a free fall festival on Oct. 27 that included face painting, candy, and a costume drive. Gamble was one of several people who organized costume donations or Halloween events for kids and families.

Nearby, the Monte Vista Hotel and a local restaurant, Goldfinch, hosted its first-ever fall festival on Oct. 26, which included a Trunk or Treat, hayride, and even therapy horses, among other activities. There were also about 400 costume donations for people to choose from. Everything offered at the event was donated from in and out-of-state. The hotel, located in Black Mountain, had been providing free meals to people in the days after Helene hit, and has been housing people whose properties were damaged in the storm and qualify as survivors with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA has been providing assistance and coordinating relief efforts to states—like North Carolina—that were impacted by Helene.

But still, hotel staff wanted to do more.

“None of us, I think, thought this was going to last as long as it has in our little town,” says Chloe Greene, the hotel’s assistant general manager. Black Mountain, like Asheville, was one of many communities devastated by Helene—the storm brought severe flooding and damaged numerous properties in the area. Black Mountain is also still under a boil water notice as of Tuesday, according to Greene.

“We just wanted to provide relief for parents that were worrying about so much,” says Ken Floyd, the hotel’s general manager. He says nearly 1,500 people attended the event.

“We gave out about 200 plus pounds of candy. And to see the kids’ faces light up when they got to pick out their costume…” Floyd adds. “People got to sit down, relax, eat some food, and watch their kids just have a great time and that’s really … what it was all about.”

Morgen Stanzler, like Gamble, wanted to collect costume donations to help out the Black Mountain community, where she and her family own a second home. After Helene, she started collecting decoration kits for the Monte Vista Hotel’s Trunk or Treat and costumes for the festival’s costume drive.

“I love this place so much,” Stanzler says. “In the wake of a tragedy like this, I can’t rebuild roads, there’s not too much I can do. … [But I wanted to help] the community to just find a little bit of joy in the middle of something that’s really devastating.”

After back-to-back storms, Floridians come together

Soon after Helene ripped through Florida, residents had to start preparing for another storm: Hurricane Milton. Officials issued evacuation orders for millions of people in the Tampa area. While not as severe as meteorologists had expected it to be, Milton brought more destruction to the state—tornadoes hit parts of the state, and the storm flooded neighborhoods and downed trees.

In the aftermath of Milton, Karen Aucoin—who owns an event and wedding venue in Largo, Florida in the Tampa Bay area—decided to move forward with her business’ annual Halloween event. Studio 131, has hosted it the past few years, and this year’s event featured a Trunk or Treat, vendor market, and a haunted manor at its event venue space on Oct. 13. Most of the event was free; the haunted manor had a $5 fee, but Aucoin says they waived it for people who didn’t have it. Between 100-200 people came to the event, Aucoin estimates. Studio 131 has also been working with local organizations to collect donations for people who were affected by the hurricanes.

“I just knew, no matter what, we have to do something really good for the community—give everybody a sense of normalcy,” Aucoin says.

Some Halloween-themed events in the area helped raise money for victims of the storms. Gerry Cachia, in Seminole, Florida—parts of which experienced significant storm damage from Helene and Milton—organized the Rotary Club of Seminole Lake’s Haunted Graveyard event this year. In the past, the proceeds for the event have gone to help foster kids in the area, but this year, the club decided to give half to hurricane relief efforts.

The event on Oct. 26 included a haunted graveyard set up in the parking lot of a local shopping mall, candy booths throughout, and a costume contest. Cachia dressed up as “The Pumpkin Master” by wearing a suit with pumpkins all over it and a pumpkin mask. He had hoped that the event would help take people’s minds off the fallout from the storms and give them a bit of a break. And he says he thinks it did just that. Roughly 1,200 people showed up, and the club raised nearly $6,000.

The lengths friends and neighbors have gone to to make sure kids and families can enjoy Halloween is consistent with how communities have been coming together in the wake of two brutal natural disasters, people say.

“Neighbors who didn’t know each other before now are best friends,” Cachia says. “You’ll drive around and there’s people that have set up water stations that just were people that want to help. There’s people driving around in the communities with ice and garbage bags and just giving them to people. When you have such a disaster, it really does bring out—it sounds corny to say—but it brings out the good in people.”