A Festival of Oddities

Charlotte’s annual Festival of Oddities, presented by Scream Queen Productions and the Courthouse Square Association, invites those with a taste for the morbid and macabre to enjoy two days of fearsome entertainment at the historic and purportedly haunted Courthouse Square Museum.

The weekend will kick off with a Cryptid Crawl at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, traveling from the corner of East Harris and North Oliver streets to the museum. Participants are encouraged to wear their best cryptid costume, “whether that’s a hyper-realistic costume, something homemade or your favorite Mothman T-shirt.” 

The $5 daily admission fee for the museum will allow access to a series of spooky selfie stations, the new Deadtime Stories location, a “creature cavern” with a variety of “creepy crawlies” available for adoption, meet-and-greet opportunities with paranormal investigators and documentarians from Crossroads of Curiosities LLC and a collection of presentations by some of Michigan’s top true-crime and paranormal experts, including author and paranormal researcher Amberrose Hammond, spiritual medium and energy reader Exie Susanne Smith, and true-crime podcasters Nina Innsted and Jenn Carpenter. For a $25 fee, Erica Jo Photography will provide mini sasquatch-themed shoots. 

On the museum lawn, free activities will include a macabre marketplace with more than 100 “peddlers of the peculiar,” a Living Library offering meet-and-greets with a selection of true-crime and horror authors, a food truck row with several different options, adoptable pets (more furry and feathery than the ones in the museum), caricatures, face painting, flash tattoos, crafts, a UFO bounce house and much more. 

Saturday evening, Crossroads of Curiosities will host a special paranormal investigation at the museum. Tickets are limited and are available at square.link/u/XDltXAug. 

For more information, including a lineup of Living Library authors and presentation topics, visit festivalofoddities.com.