Trick-or-Treating tradition continues on the Row

The Row came alive from 7-9 p.m. this Halloween as trick-or-treaters filled the street for the annual tradition of Row Trick-or-Treating. Houses were decked in colorful lights and cobwebs, tombstones and pumpkins sat on lawns and greedy hands clawed for candy at a record 25 houses across Mayfield Ave, Lasuen Mall, Campus Drive, Alvarado Row and Bowdoin Lane.

According to Madhav Prakash ’27, the ASSU director of social life and inclusivity who helped organize the event, there were over “500 pounds of candy in total available at the front doors of these houses.” The ASSU and participating row houses collaborated to create the decorations. 

At the corner of Mayfield Ave and Campus Drive, Street Meat served spooky desserts. Speakers also blasted Halloween music across the Row. Prakash said that part of the event’s purpose was “to serve as early-evening festivities before people head off to their Halloween functions for the night.”

Outside Mars, a web-covered table held a toddler-sized spider and a cauldron of candy. Down the street, the Well House featured an eight-foot pumpkin figure and a backyard screening of Hocus Pocus (1993). 

Further up the street, Grove strung cobwebs all across trees in the front yard and turned the lawn into a graveyard, with tombstones surrounding the table of treats.

“Trick-or-treating is going great,” said Lucia Vigil ’29, who was dressed as Krypto the Superdog. “I love how close the houses are to one another. It makes it feel like this is a real little neighborhood. I also just love walking around with my friends.”

“In general, the houses could use more chocolate,” Vigil added.

Jasper Karlson ’28 called the event “a great success.” Karlson said he was “a big fan of any event that brings people to the upper row, and I think it’s a great way for freshmen to see parts of campus that they wouldn’t necessarily see otherwise.”

“It would’ve been nice for the trick or treaters to get to see inside the houses,” Karlson said. “But it’s always a cute nostalgic event that’s become a great Halloween staple,”

Past the candy and costumes, this year’s Trick-or-Treating also took some work behind the scenes. According to Prakash, though Row Trick-or-Treating has been a tradition since he started at Stanford, this year required some creativity to keep it alive. 

Last year, funding for Row Trick-or-Treating came from Stanford’s discontinued neighborhood system, “We had to jump through some hoops and figure out how we could use ASSU’s Traditions budget to accommodate candy for so many,” Prakash said.

Another challenge Prakash noted about setting up Trick-or-Treating this year was “inviting people to actually come trick-or-treating,” he said. After reaching out to faculty and staff leaders, ASSU publicized the event in email newsletters. They also reached out to local day cares, homeowners associations and graduate students to spread the word. 

Prakash said he hopes n the future to “reinstate some additional funding either from ResEd or the VPSAs office so this is not entirely ASSU-funded.” He added that he’d also like to see haunted houses and costume contests happen at the same time as the trick-or-treating.

“Events like this help Stanford feel like a close community,” Vigil said. “It’s nothing crazy, just college students wanting to feel like kids again.”

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