This year’s Halloween in Peterborough, Ontario, doesn’t have to be just one night this year — it can be three.
Between Thursday, October 29 and Saturday, October 31, 2026, the historic Sadleir House at 751 George Street North is hosting a run of back-to-back shows as part of its long-running Live @ the John concert series:
- All Hallows Fling with The Detention Club on Thursday
- Tapeworm Presents: DEVILS NIGHT on Friday
- A three-band bill featuring Mokomokai, elms, and Don’t Tell Sarah on Saturday.
All three events share the same small, atmospheric room, the same all-ages-and-licensed format, and the same tight 45-person capacity, but each one has its own personality, its own lineup, and its own reason to show up.
Whether you’re trying to decide which single night fits your schedule or you’re the kind of person who’s going to buy tickets to all three, here’s everything you need to know.
Sadleir House: The Historic Peterborough Venue Behind Three Nights of Halloween
Before getting into the individual shows, it’s worth understanding where they’re actually happening, because Sadleir House is not a conventional concert venue.
Officially operated as the P.R. Community and Student Association, Sadleir House is housed in a historic Queen Anne-style mansion built in 1892, and it blends heritage charm with grassroots energy, offering accessible spaces for concerts, meetings, rehearsals, study, and activism.
The building serves as a key gathering place for both Trent University students and the broader Peterborough community, which means that on any given week the same rooms hosting a punk show or a goth DJ set might also be used for a Dungeons & Dragons session, a yoga class, a small theatre production, or a local art collective meeting.
The specific space used for all three Halloween-weekend shows is known as “The John,” a room with a general rental capacity of around 85 people that also lends its name to the Live @ the John concert series itself.
For these three events, Tapeworm and the other promoters involved have capped attendance at 45 tickets per night, a tighter number than the room’s maximum, likely to leave room for staging, merchandise tables, and, in Friday’s case, an entire secondary setup for tarot readings and a vintage television display.
The Live @ the John Series: A Fall Calendar Built on Community Shows
All three Halloween-weekend events are officially part of Live @ the John, a concert series that has been running at Sadleir House continuously since September 1, 2023, with events already booked on the calendar as far out as the end of 2036.
That’s a remarkable run for a single-room, community-operated series, and it reflects just how central Sadleir House has become to Peterborough’s independent music scene over the past several years.
The series isn’t limited to any one genre, either — the same October 2026 stretch that includes these three Halloween shows also features a folk-leaning double bill with Evangeline Gentle and Rae Spoon, an independent news anniversary event with a trio of local acts, a solo night from singer-songwriter Shawn William Clarke, and another multi-artist bill the following week headlined by Mary Kate Edwards.
Seeing three Halloween-adjacent shows stacked back-to-back on three consecutive nights within that same series says something about how Sadleir House programs its calendar during the city’s biggest party weekend of the fall.
Rather than trying to cram every genre and audience into one mega-event, the venue and its promoters are instead offering three smaller, distinct nights — a costumed cover-band party, a goth-and-horror film night, and a hard-hitting local band showcase — so that different corners of Peterborough’s music-loving population each get a night built specifically for them.
Night One: All Hallows Fling with The Detention Club (Thursday, October 29)
Kicking off the weekend is All Hallows Fling on Thursday, October 29, 2026, with doors at 7:00 PM and the show starting at 7:30 PM EDT.
The headliner is The Detention Club, and based on the event’s own description, this is being framed less as a standard concert and more as a costumed theme night — a “Halloween Detention Session” packed with what the listing calls classic spooky favourites, unexpected discoveries, costumes, and surprises.
The centerpiece audience-interaction element of the night is a costume contest, with a Best Costume winner taking home Detention Club merchandise. That’s a meaningful detail for anyone deciding how seriously to dress up: this is a show explicitly built to reward people who commit to the bit.
Given the venue’s intimate scale, a costume contest here is going to feel a lot more personal and visible than the same contest would at a large club night, since every attendee is going to be seen up close by both the band and the rest of the 45-person room.
General admission for All Hallows Fling is $25.00 CAD plus applicable fees, with tickets available through Ticketscene, in person at Bluestreak Records, or at the door while supplies last.
That door-sales option is actually notable, because neither of the other two nights in this run explicitly advertises day-of door tickets on their listings, which suggests All Hallows Fling may be positioned as the most walk-up-friendly of the three shows, at least until it sells out.
The official cutoff for online sales is listed as 5:59 PM EDT on the day of the show itself, unless the room fills up earlier, so anyone who wants to guarantee entry rather than gamble on door availability should still buy ahead of time.
Thematically, All Hallows Fling is the lightest, most overtly fun of the three nights, and a strong choice for anyone who wants a costume party atmosphere without needing deep familiarity with any particular band’s back catalog.
Night Two: Tapeworm Presents — DEVILS NIGHT (Friday, October 30)
The middle night of the run is the most conceptually ambitious of the three: Tapeworm Presents: DEVILS NIGHT, on Friday, October 30, 2026, with doors at 7:00 PM and the show beginning at 7:30 PM EDT.
Where All Hallows Fling leans into costume-party fun, DEVILS NIGHT is built around a film, a specific slice of American urban history, and a sequence of live music sets that move the room from a seated screening into a dark, dance-oriented back half of the evening.
The name itself is a reference to a real and fairly dark chapter of American history. Devil’s Night refers to October 30, the night before Halloween, and it became internationally infamous in Detroit, Michigan, where what began in the 1970s as youthful mischief in inner-city neighborhoods escalated into hundreds of acts of arson and vandalism, peaking in the mid-to-late 1980s.
For this event, The Crow (1994) opens on Devil’s Night in a crime-ravaged, decrepit Detroit, where a young woman named Shelly Webster is fatally wounded while her fiancé, rock musician Eric Draven, is murdered and thrown from their loft window.
A year later, a crow resurrects Eric’s spirit so he can hunt down the gang responsible, guided by comic-book mythology about crows carrying souls to the land of the dead. Ernie Hudson, best known to mainstream audiences as Winston Zeddemore from Ghostbusters, plays Sergeant Albrecht, the Detroit police officer who becomes Eric’s reluctant ally over the course of the story.
In tribute to that character, Tapeworm will be serving veggie dogs during the screening — a small, well-researched nod to the street-food, lunch-cart atmosphere that runs through the film.
Once the credits roll, the night shifts into three distinct live music sets.
First is a live electronic performance from Gnostic Front, followed by an all-vinyl goth DJ set from Ryan Worden — a meaningful curatorial choice, since spinning an entire goth or darkwave set exclusively on vinyl requires a much deeper personal collection and a different kind of mixing skill than pulling tracks from a digital library.
Closing out the music is a dark dance set from jordanwarmjets, one of Tapeworm’s own resident performers.
Beyond the music, the night also includes tarot card readings and a “dead media room” stocked with Nightmare-franchise and other horror VHS tapes playing across a wall of glowing vintage television sets — a concept that echoes writer Bruce Sterling’s 1995 “dead media” idea, which described obsolete communication formats as a kind of graveyard of technologies that once seemed permanently cutting-edge.
General admission for DEVILS NIGHT is $15.00 CAD plus a $1.72 CAD service fee, noticeably cheaper than the other two nights in this run, with tickets available through Ticketscene or in person at Bluestreak Records.
Night Three: Mokomokai, elms, and Don’t Tell Sarah (Saturday, October 31)
The weekend closes on Halloween night itself with a three-act bill: Mokomokai, elms, and Don’t Tell Sarah, on Saturday, October 31, 2026.
This show starts later than the other two, with doors at 8:00 PM and the set beginning at 8:30 PM EDT, which makes sense as the capstone of a three-night run and gives attendees time to finish trick-or-treating, costume parties, or dinner plans before heading to Sadleir House.
General admission runs $25.00 CAD plus fees, with the same 45-person capacity as the other two nights, and the official cutoff for online sales sits at 6:59 PM EDT on the day of the show unless it sells out first.
Mokomokai is a Peterborough, Ontario metal band, described by music press as modern-day metallic warriors, and the group has spent years building a national touring profile well beyond its hometown.
Their 2017 album Poison Whiptail, produced by Ian Blurton and released via Boonsdale Records, led to a headlining Canadian tour that ran from Toronto and London, Ontario through British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, with frontman John Ellis describing the band’s sound in suitably dramatic terms as drawing on imagery of northern titans and abysmal lords.
Co-billed act elms, meanwhile, has its own long-standing presence in the Peterborough scene, having played local stages for well over a decade; one retrospective local music roundup described the project with the memorable phrase “architects of pop gloom,” placing the band on a bill alongside local rap and electronic acts at another well-known Peterborough venue.
elms’ kind of melodic-but-melancholic framing fits naturally alongside Mokomokai’s heavier sound and dovetails with the darker, moodier tone of Halloween night itself, suggesting a bill that moves between metal intensity and gloom-pop atmosphere rather than sticking to a single genre lane all night.
Don’t Tell Sarah rounds out the bill as the evening’s opener, a support slot worth arriving early for, especially in a room this size where every act gets heard up close.
Taken together, this is the night built most squarely around live music. It’s also, notably, the only one of the three nights with a confirmed touring-level headliner, which may make it the hardest ticket to get once word gets around.
Getting There for Halloween at Sadleir House: Parking and Transit Options
Sadleir House has extremely limited on-site parking. It’s strongly advised to consider alternative transit options rather than assuming they’ll find a spot right outside the building.
The recommended fallback for drivers is street parking, specifically along George Street south of Parkhill Street and along Water Street north of Parkhill Street, both within easy walking distance of the venue’s George Street North address.
Given that Sadleir House sits close to Trent University’s downtown-adjacent presence and already draws a heavy walking and cycling crowd, building a few extra minutes into your plans to find street parking — or simply arranging a rideshare, especially on a Halloween weekend when downtown traffic and pedestrian activity both spike — will save considerable hassle.
For anyone local enough to walk or bike, skipping the parking question entirely remains the simplest option and fits the community-venue spirit of all three shows better than circling the block in a car anyway.
Where Will You Be Spending Your Halloween in Peterborough? Join Us!
Three consecutive nights at Sadleir House, each with its own distinct personality, adds up to one of the more interesting Halloween weekends on Peterborough’s calendar this year.
- Thursday’s All Hallows Fling offers costumed, crowd-participation fun built around The Detention Club and a best-costume contest.
- Friday’s Tapeworm Presents: DEVILS NIGHT delivers the most conceptually layered night of the three, pairing a full screening of The Crow and a thoughtful Ernie Hudson tribute with electronic, vinyl-goth, and dark-dance sets alongside tarot readings and a glowing wall of horror VHS tapes.
- Saturday’s Mokomokai, elms, and Don’t Tell Sarah bill closes the weekend with a genuine homegrown live show anchored by a metal band you won’t want to miss if you enjoy heavy music.
Given the shared capacity cap and the extra draw each show carries, buying tickets ahead of time through Ticketscene or Bluestreak Records, rather than counting on day-of availability, is the safer bet for any night you don’t want to miss.
And whichever evening you choose, remember to sort out parking before you go: with street spots on George Street south of Parkhill and Water Street north of Parkhill as your best bet, a few extra minutes of planning will get you through the door and into one of Sadleir House’s most ambitious Halloween weekends yet.
Get your tickets here to these events at Sadleir House or browse what’s to come in the calendar!
