Top 5 Tips for Visiting Disneyland During Halloween in 2025

Halloween is one of the best times of year to visit Disneyland, with spooky decor across the resort, special entertainment, themed ride overlays, and more! This year, Halloween takes place during Disneyland’s 70th anniversary celebration, so you can enjoy a mix of seasonal and anniversary offerings. The Halloween celebration runs from late August through the end of October, so there is a generous window of time to visit and enjoy all of the festivities.

We will take you through the top 5 things you should know if you are visiting Disneyland this Halloween season!

1) Try one of the seasonal Halloween character experiences available! Over the past few years, Disneyland has added more theming to its character dining experiences, and there are now three different seasonal options to choose from during the Halloween celebration. This is an excellent way to get into the Halloween spirit! It’s an especially great activity for your check-in or check-out day, as no park admission is required to dine at the Disneyland Resort hotels.

The new seasonal character dining offering this year is “Clarabelle’s Enchanted Halloween Dinner" at the Grand Californian’s Storytellers Cafe, which will feature Clarabelle Cow and her woodland pals wearing Halloween attire. During the daytime at this location, you can enjoy Mickey’s Autumn Adventures Breakfast Buffet, with characters in autumn-inspired outfits. Goofy’s Kitchen Celebrates Halloween! at the Disneyland Hotel features a breakfast, brunch, or dinner experience with costumed characters and Halloween-inspired decor, music, and menu items.

2) Plan to enjoy the 70th anniversary and seasonal Halloween entertainment offerings. While the main entertainment highlight of the Halloween celebration is the “Halloween Screams" nighttime spectacular, select 70th anniversary entertainment offerings will continue as well, like the “Paint the Night" parade, new “World of Color Happiness" show, “Tapestry of Happiness" projections on “it's a small world," and 70th additions to Toy Story Midway Mania. We recommend a 3-day visit so that you can enjoy these offerings over the course of multiple days.

As you’re exploring all of the top Disneyland Halloween highlights throughout the resort, be sure to also save some time for the fun 70th anniversary Key to Disneyland scavenger hunt and MagicBand+ interaction points that engage with the various lands of Disneyland Park!

3) Watch out for nights when Oogie Boogie Bash closes Disney California Adventure early. On party nights, the park closes early at 6 pm. Make sure you’re not caught off guard by this! If you have a park hopper ticket, you can jump over to Disneyland Park when the event starts, or spend the day enjoying a 1-day Disneyland Park itinerary if you have a 1 Park Per Day ticket type. You can see all of the dates that Disney California Adventure will be closing early here.

4) Plan your visit around peak crowds! October is one of the most crowded months of the year to visit Disneyland. If this is the only time you can plan your visit, don’t worry, as you can get a lot done if you have a good strategy to beat the crowds. However, if you have the flexibility to plan your visit during the earlier part of the celebration, we recommend doing so. The last week of August and many parts of September are significantly less crowded. You can see our Mickey Visit Disneyland crowd calendar for crowd level projections every day of the year, including throughout the Halloween celebration.

5) Try the seasonal Halloween foods, and make sure to use mobile ordering at quick-service locations. One of the highlights of the Disneyland Halloween celebration is the number of themed seasonal treats available! Many of these treats are offered at quick-service locations where you can mobile order them. Mobile ordering will save you a lot of time, especially at the most popular locations that tend to have long ordering lines when the parks are crowded. We recommend looking at all of the Disneyland Halloween foods ahead of your trip and using our PDF printable to mark which ones look of interest. You should also save some room in your budget for the super cute Halloween popcorn buckets and other novelties available this year!

You can see everything you need to know about this year’s celebration in our full guide to Disneyland at Halloween, as well as some new changes and additions for this year’s celebration.

At Mickey Visit, we share the most important tips for planning your trips to Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Disney Cruise Line, Universal, and beyond and share the latest Disney news. Each week, we’ll share some of our top tips here on Laughing Place.