BUCKHANNON – Regular ol’ Buckhannon will be scared off, and the city will transform into ‘Boooockhannon’ this October.

At their meeting Tuesday, the Colonial Arts Center Board discussed at least seven events that are planned to take place in Buckhannon this October. Four of the events will involve the CAC, including the Buckhannon Community Theatre’s production of “Clue” Oct. 6 to 9 at 6 to 8 p.m.; a free move night featuring “Night of the Living Dead,” Oct. 20-21 at 7:30 p.m.; the registration for the Zombie Run 5K Oct. 22 at 8 a.m.; and The Zombie Crawl Oct. 29 at 8:30 p.m.

Colonial Arts Center manager Anne Wilson said she and community members David McCauley and Greg Popovich have been meeting recently to arrange a connected set of events to celebrate the spooky season.

“We’ve all been meeting every couple of weeks, and we’ve put together this month-long [series of] community events and I’ve talked to Debora at Stockert and gotten her information about her Halloween events,” Wilson told the Colonial Arts Center Board at its Sept. 6 meeting. “I wanted to incorporate those and then I also got the information about the Trunk or Treat from the police department, so I wanted to put everything under this umbrella of community Halloween events, and then promote it as something that we can do every year in Buckhannon.”

She is hoping to meet with local businesses on Main Street to encourage them to decorate their windows for Halloween, giving the town a connected spooky ambiance. McCauley, a member of Buckhannon City Council, said a group of community members wanted to give everyone a different way to celebrate Halloween every weekend in October.

“The idea is just to have fun, and this is under the city umbrella – it’s not a separate organization or anything, it’s just a few of us who like Halloween, that are coming together to try to do something fun and every Friday and Saturday of the five weekends in October,” McCauley said. “We’d like to have about 10 substantial events during the month of October to have fun.”

McCauley said he wanted to bring more fun and community-based events to the center, now that its nearing completion.

“We sold the original concept of the Colonial as being this center for community fun, and as much of that as we can we want to continue to do together, collaboratively,” McCauley said. “I’m recalling back in those early days of late 2016, early 2017, when we started Battles of the Bands and things of that sort, it was all about the fun and raising a few bucks for the next phase in the project.”

Community member Greg Popovich said delegating all the city Halloween events under one group helps with advertising the events and making sure none of them are competing against each other.

“I really liked the collaborative nature of this because everybody has been in communication with other groups – Stockert for example, and the gentlemen that are organizing the 5k – because the last thing you want is events on top of events where people have to choose,” Popovich said. “We can carefully orchestrate the schedule and say, ‘here’s something fun to do this weekend, here’s something random to do on a Thursday night’ – there’s strength in numbers.”