Forty Halloweens and counting: Derry dresses up, parades, and lights the sky

Derry has closed its 40th Halloween festival the way it has closed them for decades: together, in costume, under fireworks. What began in the mid-1980s as a small fancy-dress gathering has grown into a five-day, city-wide celebration of folklore and community — billed as Europe's largest Halloween festival, expecting more than 120,000 visitors between 28 October and 1 November. Hundreds of local performers filled the closing Carnival Parade on 31 October before the fireworks finale. This year organisers added ticketed access to part of the Walled City Trail to manage the crowds, while most of the festival stayed free. Forty years on, the joke is still on nobody — it is a whole city agreeing, annually, to be gloriously silly in public.