BUCKHANNON – BuckhanaCon will most likely expand and last for two days next year, following a successful 2022 event.

Organizer of BuckhanaCon Catherine Jessi Adair Fultz said she was glad to see everyone come out to support the event after a long hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think for our first big return, everything went pretty great,” Fultz said. “We had a good turnout for coming back for the first time after COVID. I think we want to come back to the Stockert Youth & Community Center next year. A lot of people enjoy having access to the playground for their kids, so I think we may continue with Stockert until we outgrow it.”

The 2022 event took place Saturday, June 11, with both returning and all-new events on the agenda.

“Everyone absolutely loved BuckhanaQuest – it was a fun time,” Fultz said. “You had to basically walk around on a little scavenger hunt, locate all the items, and everyone had a blast with that. Of course we do our cosplay Lip Sync Battle, and this year we had quite a few entries, so we all have fun with that one.”

One of the new events included a ‘Floor is Lava,’ event that will most likely make a return.

“Based on feedback, we are going expand the event to two days, and then we’ll have more space for more panels and more games – things like that,” Fultz said.

She said the BuckhanaCon community continues to grow, and the demand for events like BuckhanaCon is bigger than some people might think.  

“Our very, very first con was showing us the demand for something that all families can enjoy when we had about 102 show up to a two-hour tiny, itsy-bitsy, mini-con,” Fultz said. “The demand is there; I just don’t think the crowd that wants to come has enough contact with each other to know that it exists. I think we all exist in Buckhannon, but I just don’t think we have an area that we all can communicate, to know these events are happening.”

The BuckhanaCon Facebook page will continue to offer events in anticipation of the next ‘con’ and to keep the community connected. 

“We do lots of different lives on the page, and we have fundraisers throughout the year because we fundraise all year long in order to pay for the con,” Fultz said. “We do a lot of contests, games and things like that on our Facebook page.”

The BuckhanaCon council is already planning two upcoming fundraisers.

“In previous years, we did a ‘Harry Potter Wine and Wand,’ which was really popular, and we are thinking about doing that again and we are planning to start a new fundraiser and hosting a sort of burlesque show for the adult side of BuckhanaCon,” Fultz said. “We have a couple of fundraisers that I think are going to be really fun — the wine wands were so fun, it was a blast – so we definitely think we are going to do that one again this year, probably sometime in August.”