The townspeople of Anoka were fed up with the dastardly energy of their disobedient young people.
The final straw, according to Rich Oxley, former president of the Anoka Historical Society, came in 1920 when “feral youths” released a herd of cows into the town. Today, Oxley leads ghost tours around downtown Anoka, combining the intrigue of the paranormal with local history lessons.
“Teenage kids and whatever, they were just creating a ruckus and they just really wanted to make a mess of things,” Oxley explains. “And [the town] didn't really know how to handle it. And they kind of got together, put their heads together, and said, ‘Hey, how about a festival?’”
And with that, the seeds were planted for Anoka to become the “Halloween Capital of the World.” Today, the capital of creep annually hosts a Grand Day Parade, ghost tours, spooky bar crawls, and house-decorating contests, all in the name of All Hallows’ Eve.
As a former feral youth of Anoka County, I took it upon myself this past weekend to investigate whether Anoka deserves that spooky honorific, which it bestowed upon itself in either 1937 or 2003. This would take me on an adventure that veered between the freakish and the family-friendly (but mostly the former). And believe me, Halloween in Anoka isn't all cutesy parades and ghost tours: Those ancient feral spirits live on in all of us, waiting to be released through cocktail concoctions and PBR potions.
The Night on the Other Side
My reporting journey began Saturday night at MaGillyCuddy’s, a cramped Irish pub just off the Rum River.
The next day, hungover and hungry, I would learn from Oxley that Whiskey Flats, the Anoka neighborhood near MaGillyCuddy’s, was originally a series of shacks and shanties set up by rum runners. Billy’s Bar & Grill, just a couple buildings over, was a popular mob hangout back in the early 1900s when it was the Jackson Hotel, and some say a tunnel under the building led to the Rum River. You know, to dispose of whacked bodies. Oxley says people see plenty of weird stuff in Billy’s and at Ambi Wine Bar nearby, including flickering lights and strange apparitions. If rumors proved true, we would be standing directly above those tunnels. I’m sorry to report that the only spirits we encountered were 80 proof.
The MaGillyCuddy’s building is a tight fit, and my bar-hopping party waited for about 10 minutes before enough space cleared for us to enter. While waiting in line, I spotted Michael Myers meandering down the dark street toward me—a knife in one hand, a sign reading “Have you seen my sister?” with a picture of Jamie Lee Curtis in the other. Feeling sufficiently unsettled, we finally entered the bar.
It seemed strange that people were leaving MaGillyCuddy’s so quickly after entering, but when I joined the amorphous blob of middle-aged drunkenness, my instinct was to also abandon ship. But first we had to try the Gilly Grenade, which came highly recommended. As you can see in this video from MaGillyCuddy’s Facebook, the drink is essentially an Irish car bomb-ified Chuck Norris, though you prime it by pulling a Fireball shot from the top of the glass and dropping some Dr. McGillycuddy’s into an unfortunately named energy drink called Liquid Ice.
The bartender who served us was wearing a bra over his shirt with several bottles of hot sauce shoved inside of it. We stared at his chest for a while, trying to sort out what this all meant, until my friend shouted “SPICE RACK!”
The bartender was pleased with his deductive abilities.
Tight Squeezes, Tequila Sodas, and Testosterone
After acquiring gut rot for about $10 per grenade, we stumbled over to the 201 Tavern & Grill to continue our Halloween debauchery. The loud and sticky joint provided just enough room to breathe though, unsurprisingly, it was also packed.
Oxley says downtown Anoka stands out among the northern exurbs because, well, it still has a downtown; most cities in the area don’t. So this is the prime party territory for Anoka County, and Halloween is as wild and loose as it gets. The best I had in my hometown, just up the river from Anoka in St. Francis, was a Beef ‘O’ Brady’s next to our Dairy Queen, a VFW next to the bowling alley, and the Back to the SRO, the sprawling rural bar made famous by Bar Rescue in 2016. Anoka was our mecca for walkable inebriation, a beautiful, bustling melting pot of partiers too far away from (or too afraid of) the Twin Cities.
Tequila soda was my drink inside 201 Tavern, but only sorta by choice; I was buying for a friend and he said “Get me a tequila soda,” so in the interest of brevity I asked for two. Tequila is a disgusting poison that only wishes to hurt me, but I drank it nonetheless.
We then decided to get some fresh air on the back patio due, in part, to the fact Anoka bars insist on keeping their lights oppressively bright. (No experts were available to explain that quirk.) Once outside, we parked ourselves between Harley Quinn and the Joker vaping on a swinging bench and the cast of The Flintstones puffing darts.
We also ran into a familiar face: Mike Myers, giving us the creeps with his damn sign, wandering around slow and silent. I approached him for an interview, asking (in so many words) what his intentions were for the evening and if the life of a serial killer is a lonely one. He declined to comment. Well, really, he just didn’t say anything at all. He looked at me, though, and there was nothing behind those eyes.
Defeated by my failure to connect with the man who made sororicide famous, I endured the additional indignity of my friends taunting me for still being on my first tequila soda. Hey, I was there on business.
Before heading inside, I caught up with some old friends from high school dressed in construction gear. A classic costume: Wear your work clothes and get blasted. On the ghost tour the next evening, Oxley would remind us that construction is a great catalyst for paranormal activity, adding bonus spooky layers. They were an omen for the dark spirits awaiting us inside, we just didn’t know it yet.
While my friends were waiting for their turns with the bartender's attention, I was sucked into the ever-growing mass of people. Eventually, a man in his 40s (to my estimate) dressed as Mario clashed with a much larger neon-clad man in his 60s (to my estimate) and fireworks ensued.
The older man said he thought Mario was falling and he was only trying to keep him from hitting the floor. Mario yelled obscenities, and the older guy yelled some back. Onlookers, including myself, yelled at both to chill out. Eventually a much younger, smaller and more even-tempered guy got in between them and reset the equilibrium. Tragically, Mario spilled my tequila soda on my cowboy jacket during the commotion. (Oh yeah, important writerly detail: I’ve been dressed as a cowboy this whole time.)
Oxley says falling objects are often indicators of paranormal activity. Apparently the Anoka Historical Society has a history of antiques and artifacts falling and spilling, even when secured the night before. While the Society does not confirm or deny the existence of ghosts, its leaders can't help but wonder how items so diligently secured seem to spill time and time again.
Unfortunately the death of my drink, as secure as it was in my hand, can only be blamed on one flesh 'n' blood Italian plumber. I returned to my place as a wallflower while my friends finished their drinks before leaving in favor of the tent party, a staple of Anoka Halloween partying.
Cover Bands, Weirdos, and Cops
Right across the street from MaGillyCuddy’s and City Hall, the tent party had a line wrapped around the block when we arrived. The 21+ venue hosts huge weekend cover concerts for their costume-clad consumers. You walk into a crowd of a couple hundred by the stage to your left and a drink table to your right, which you have to get tickets for rather than just buying at the table. Streamline the process, people!
The entry fee for the tent was $20. On any other night, I wouldn’t throw down that much dough to listen to a cover band with an average audience age double mine. (No offense to the 45-year-old geriatrics out there; you have the right to party just like the rest of us.) But my journalistic integrity means putting myself in the line of fire to inform the public, so in I went.
We scooted our way to the stage, ducking around limboing Minions and an ensemble of characters from Napoleon Dynamite. We made it to the front of the crowd before a cover band came out and belted along to modern bangers like “Mr. Brightside” and “No Scrubs.”
After a handful of drunken sing-a-longs, the band left and reappeared dressed as the staff of Hogwarts. We had Argus Filch on guitar, McGonagall on vocals, and Hagrid on vocals and some small weird drum-set thing. A couple band members were rocking plain civilian clothes—the muggle members.
Surrounded by fake cobwebs, spiders, and owls, the band ripped into a faithful run through “Fireball” by Pitbull. Around the time Hagrid started speaking about the virtues of the man bun, it was time for me to hit the porta-potties.
At one point, seven police officers escorted someone covered in fake blood and carrying a fake baseball bat out of the tent with great haste. (I was trying to count how many officers it was, and a very helpful woman dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein walked past me with seven fingers held up.)
I ran into the escortee when we got outside, and he told me he had no idea why he was kicked out. He said he was about to leave anyway, and the police came up to him and assured him of as much. He then told me he was worried about getting arrested because he got a DUI on a Lime Scooter a few days before, so who knows?
The next day, Oxley would tell us that Saturday night was a strange night in downtown Anoka: no sirens all night. We heard at least three cops or ambulances during Oxley’s 90-minute daytime ghost tour alone, but I never heard any during the great expedition. The ferality was more encouraged than I anticipated—is Halloween weekend in Anoka a low-key Purge situation?
As the night wore on, a man and a woman were preaching the word of the lord, and by that I mean they were condemning abortion, premarital sex, homosexuality, and “dressing like a prostitute.” While they passed out pamphlets and shouted churchy scolds at unwanting passersby, I spoke to an old man dressed as Henry Hefner, apparently Hugh’s brother. (Morning-after fact checking proved this to be drunk nonsense, although Hugh did have a younger brother, Keith, who also peddled porno at Playboy.)
One of the preachers, this one rocking a loud microphone, held a huge sign displaying his various condemnations. Our interview was brief. I wanted to know where the line on certain sins was drawn and what I could reliably get away with, especially considering I had already committed the sins of drunkenness, cursing, stealing, hypocrisy, lying, and others on his long list at one point or another (I’m sure I’ve “dressed like a prostitute” at least a time or two).
He didn’t outright say it, but it sure sounded like I was damned.
Damnation
My awful afterlife assured, we ventured to Serum’s Good Time Emporium for a nightcap and a slice of pizza. While we waited for our ride, the bargoing crowd began to thin out and a few people got into a fight outside. We ate our pizza with our last tequila sodas of the night among a sea of unrecognizably crumpled and sweat-stained costumes.
I was surprised to see that it was barely midnight and the bars had already started closing.
The next day, Oxley told the story of the 1973 Pumpkin Bowl while we stood across from the clash of the youth teams on Goodrich Field. He said his brother, Michael, threw the game-winning touchdown for Coon Rapids to send his team to state, and the Anoka Tornadoes home in defeat. Those Tornadoes got their name from one that ravaged the town on Father’s Day 1939 and destroyed the armory. And, in 1972, Anoka lost a pumpkin-growing contest to Blaine, who later gifted them their famous winking pumpkin that sits atop their city hall.
Maybe Anoka is damned, too, having cursed the world with figures like Michelle Bachmann and Garrison Keillor. Its marquee festival of (apparent) worldwide renown was born to appease the raucous youth, though it eventually morphed into a playground for raucous middle-agers wearing Spirit Halloween costumes.
But if downtown Anoka is indeed hell, I can still imagine worse places to be damned for eternity.
