On October 1, the county seat stops calling itself Conway.

For the fifth consecutive year, by proclamation of the mayor, the city on the Waccamaw becomes “Halloween, South Carolina” — new signage, a rebranded city website, thousands of plastic pumpkins strung through live oaks, and a haunted pirate ship tied up near the marina. The name change carries no legal force. Water bills still say Conway. The post office does not care [Travel + Leisure, 2025]. This transformation into Halloween SC has attracted national attention.

But the money is real, the crowds are real, and the strain on county and state roads is real. What began as a decorating idea has grown into one of the largest single-month tourism events in Horry County — and, this year, into a genuine capacity question that neither the city nor the county has fully answered in public.

Here is what Horry County residents should understand before the pumpkins go up.

Exploring Halloween SC: A Unique Celebration

From 500 Pumpkin Buckets to a Regional Draw

The origin story is smaller than the spectacle suggests. In 2019, city employees hung roughly 500 trick-or-treat buckets in the Main Street trees. When residents began asking in 2021 when the pumpkins were coming back, city staff realized they had accidentally created a destination [Travel + Leisure, 2025].

The seasonal name change followed in 2022. Today the display runs to thousands of pumpkins and takes about two weeks of staff labor just to hang — decorating for the 2025 season began September 2 and ran roughly six weeks [MyHorryNews, 2025]. Teardown, by contrast, happens in a single night: about 35 city employees and volunteers strip Halloween off Main Street starting at 10 p.m. on November 1, and the Christmas crew arrives at 6 a.m. the next morning [MyHorryNews, 2025].

City Administrator Adam Emrick has been candid that the strategy was born of competitive frustration. Conway had spent years on Christmas lights and could not out-shine McAdenville, North Carolina, or Dahlonega, Georgia, both of which had decades of head start in a tighter footprint. Halloween was an open lane — a holiday no comparable Southern city had claimed at scale [Mountain Electric Cooperative/MPD, 2025].

That is a legitimate economic development insight, and it worked. The question that follows is who financed it.

Who Pays: The Hospitality Fee, and What It Doesn’t Cover

Conway spends roughly $225,000 a year on holiday decorating across all seasons, and Emrick has been consistent in public that the money comes entirely from the city’s hospitality fee — a point-of-sale collection on prepared food and beverage — rather than from property taxes or general revenue [Spectrum News, 2026].

That distinction matters, and it is largely accurate. Under South Carolina law, hospitality and accommodations revenue is restricted to tourism-related expenditures; it cannot be swept into general operations. Conway maintains an Accommodations Tax Advisory Committee, majority-staffed by hospitality industry members, that recommends how a portion of that money is spent [City of Conway, 2026].

But “we don’t spend property tax revenue” is a narrower claim than it sounds, and residents should read it precisely. It describes the decorating budget. It does not describe the full public cost of hosting 450,000-plus people in a historic district of a few square blocks.

Police overtime for weekend crowd and traffic management. Public works crews reconfiguring parking lanes and closing streets. Sanitation. Fire and EMS coverage. Wear on municipal infrastructure. Those functions are budgeted departmentally, and to date the city has not published a consolidated, all-in cost of the City of Halloween — decorations plus personnel plus services — set against the hospitality fee revenue it generates.

The city says the return is strong: downtown hospitality fee collections have risen roughly 20 percent year over year since the celebration ramped up, and Emrick has reported that essentially every downtown restaurant owner he spoke with described October 2025 as their best month on record [MPD, 2025; WPDE, 2025]. Those are believable claims. They are also, at present, largely anecdotal and self-reported. A full cost-and-revenue accounting would either confirm the city’s case decisively or reveal where the margin actually sits. Horry County residents fund the police, fire, and road departments that absorb the overflow. They are entitled to see the whole ledger, not the favorable half of it.

Which leads to a second measurement problem.

The Number Nobody Quite Agrees On

In November 2025, Conway announced record attendance. What that record was depends on which outlet you read.

One television station reported more than 466,000 visitors for October [WMBF, 2025]. Another reported more than 450,000 [WPDE, 2025]. A transcript-based summary of the November 3 council meeting recorded Emrick citing 456,900 downtown visits, a peak day of about 37,500 on October 18, and an October daily average of 14,800 [CitizenPortal, 2025]. The peak-day date itself was reported inconsistently across outlets.

None of this suggests bad faith. It suggests that a fast-growing figure is being relayed verbally at council meetings and re-reported downstream without a published source document.

The distinction that matters most is the one buried in the phrasing: visits is not the same as visitors. Conway’s counts come from a pedestrian tracking system. A resident who walks Main Street four times in October is not four tourists. A family that parks, walks to dinner, returns to the car, and re-enters the district may register more than once. Every downtown with counters faces this, and it is not a scandal — but it does mean the headline number is a measure of foot traffic volume, not of unique human beings, and it should not be used interchangeably with visitor counts from other destinations.

That caveat is worth remembering when the city compares itself to Hilton Head. Emrick told council that Conway’s 2.8 million downtown visits in calendar year 2025 exceeded Hilton Head’s roughly 2.5 million annual visitors, and he has predicted Conway will approach 3 million in 2026 [Spectrum News, 2026]. Those two figures are almost certainly not measured the same way. The comparison makes a great press line. It is not an apples-to-apples benchmark, and county officials making tourism-investment decisions should treat it accordingly.

The counting question would be academic if the crowds were comfortable. Last October, they weren’t.

Success Arrived Faster Than the Road Network

By the third week of October 2025, downtown Conway had a traffic problem serious enough to reach the council floor.

Attendance was running 46.2 percent ahead of the prior year. The city responded mid-season with improvised measures: banning left turns off Main Street on Thursday-through-Sunday evenings, opening a full lane of Marina Drive to parking, restricting Fifth Avenue parking to preserve two-way flow, closing Sixth Avenue between Main and Laurel to non-local traffic, and reserving the City Hall lot for staff and accessible parking. Emrick described the approach as testing changes and measuring whether they helped [MyHorryNews, 2025; Post and Courier, 2025].

Council Member William Goldfinch reported hearing widespread constituent complaints about traffic, and made a point of noting they were coming from ordinary residents — <br>”not just from the Halloween haters,” as he put it [Post and Courier, 2025].

Here is the county-level dimension that has gone underdiscussed. The corridors absorbing the overflow are not city streets. Traffic backs up on routes feeding in from Highway 90, Highway 905, Loris, and the beaches — county and state roads, maintained with county and state dollars, carrying a load generated by a municipal marketing program. City officials have repeatedly directed through-traffic to the U.S. 501 Bypass [WMBF, 2025].

Conway’s own hometown paper has argued the celebration risks becoming a victim of its own success and floated satellite parking with shuttles as the obvious fix [MyHorryNews, 2025]. That is a sound idea. It is also one that requires land, buses, and money — none of which the decorating budget covers, and some of which would logically involve county cooperation.

What This Means for the Rest of the Grand Strand

For Horry County residents outside Conway, three implications stand out.

First, shoulder-season value. October used to be a slow month countywide. Conway has demonstrated that inland Horry County can generate beach-season-scale foot traffic in the off months, at a fraction of what a comparable attraction would cost to build. That is a genuine lesson for Loris, Aynor, and every small municipality that has been told its downtown cannot compete.

Second, replicability has limits. Conway’s advantage is a compact, walkable, historic district with mature live oaks — physical assets accumulated over two centuries that cannot be purchased with a hospitality fee line item. Cities that copy the decorations without the density will not get the result.

Third, the growth curve is now the story. Attendance has climbed roughly 50,000 a year since 2022, and last year jumped far more than that. Conway is planning for close to 3 million downtown visits in 2026 [Spectrum News, 2026]. At some point, a historic district of this size stops absorbing more people. The city has not publicly identified that ceiling or published a capacity plan.

The Bottom Line

The City of Halloween is a real accomplishment. It was built cheaply, it was funded from a legally appropriate source, it moved money into locally owned businesses during a dead month, and it put Horry County’s county seat in national outlets on a budget most cities would spend on a single consultant study.

None of that exempts it from scrutiny. Three questions remain open going into October 2026: What does the celebration cost in total, across every department, not just decorations? What exactly is the city counting, and where is that methodology published? And what is the plan when the crowd outgrows the district — because on current trajectory, that is a question of when.

Ask them now, in September. By the third Saturday in October, nobody will be able to hear you over the traffic.

Exploring Halloween SC: A Unique Celebration

From 500 Pumpkin Buckets to a Regional Draw

Who Pays: The Hospitality Fee, and What It Doesn’t Cover

The Number Nobody Quite Agrees On

Success Arrived Faster Than the Road Network

What This Means for the Rest of the Grand Strand

The Bottom Line

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A Horry County City Changes Its Name in 30 Days. Halloween SC is known nationally

Exploring Halloween SC: A Unique Celebration

From 500 Pumpkin Buckets to a Regional Draw

Who Pays: The Hospitality Fee, and What It Doesn’t Cover

The Number Nobody Quite Agrees On

Success Arrived Faster Than the Road Network

What This Means for the Rest of the Grand Strand

The Bottom Line

Further Reading

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