Lavonia Celebrates Halloween With Carnival and Haunted House

Local municipalities in Franklin and Hart Counties will all be sponsoring Halloween festivities this Friday to ensure children all have a safe and fun time trick or treating.

A couple of fun activities are going on this weekend in Lavonia.

First on Friday evening from 4p to 6p, is the third annual Halloween Carnival at the Gazebo downtown.

Sponsored by the Lavonia Downtown Development Authority, director Marie Morse says it promises to be a fun time with lots of fun things for kids to do.

“We’ll have a costume contest for infants through age 12, we will have a DJ you can dance with, inflatables, and new this year is Twister the Clown. He will be doing a Halloween Magic Show. And of course plenty of Halloween Candy,” Morse said.

Downtown businesses will have tables at the Gazebo offering goodies for little Trick or Treaters,  Morse said.

The event is free and parents are encouraged to come with their children.

In the past, Lavonia businesses in the downtown area would hand out candy to trick or treaters as they passed by, but Morse said the City decided to change that for safety reasons.

“We feel like it is safer to have the event contained in one area and not have to worry about children crossing SR17 or 59, which are very busy highways,” she said.

Morse said however, since the change over to a festival-like event at the Gazebo, the response from parents has been favorable.

Also, in Lavonia Friday night older children and adults will be able to get their spook on by taking a tour through the annual Whispering Hills Sanitarium.

Put on by the Franklin County Community Players, this year, the haunted house is in a different location, according to director Emily Lumley.

“It’s right beside the cleaners on West Main,” she said. “You should see our lights and our logo and it will lead you there.”

Lumley said this year’s haunted sanitarium will have some new rooms that promise to be just as scary as in years past.

“This year we’ve kept the same theme of a broken down hospital, but we have a lot of new rooms with new effects,” Lumley said. “We have brought back some of the old rooms, but we put a  new twist on them.”

It’s $10 to go through the haunted house.

Whispering Hills Sanitarium is open Friday and Saturday night from 7p to midnight and on Sunday evening from 7p to 10p.

And as we get closer to Friday we will of course be filling you in on all the other Halloween activities going on in Royston, Canon, and Hartwell this weekend.