Bronx Zoo‘s Boo at the Zoo returns on September 26, 2026, running weekends through the end of October.
It is the zoo’s autumn festival: costumes, a hay maze, pumpkin carving, extinct-animal graveyard displays, and the thing that separates it from a generic Halloween event: animal chats with keepers, scheduled through the day.
What a zoo does with Halloween
Seasonal events at zoos are easy to be cynical about. They are attendance drivers, and they mostly involve activities that have nothing to do with animals.
The interesting question is what a zoo does with the crowd once it has it. Boo at the Zoo puts keeper talks into the middle of a festival day, which means a family that came for the hay maze ends up standing in front of a keeper explaining an animal. That is a materially different transaction from a haunted attraction in a parking lot, and it is most of the argument for why zoos run these events beyond the ticket revenue.
The extinct-animal graveyard is the sharper piece of programming. A mock cemetery with headstones for species that are gone is a Halloween-shaped delivery mechanism for the least comfortable fact in the building.
Practical details
Boo at the Zoo runs on weekends from September 26 through the end of October at the Bronx Zoo, and is included with admission. Times and the full activity schedule are on the zoo’s website.
Autumn programming is now a substantial part of the calendar across the field. Toronto Zoo runs Glow in the Wild, a lantern festival on much the same seasonal logic.
