Giant Spiders, Haunted Pubs & Restless Spirits: Ghost In The Rocks Returns To Sydney

For most of the year, The Rocks keeps its many ghosts and ghouls tucked politely behind sandstone walls. This October, they are being handed the entire damn place.

Ghost in The Rocks is returning for four nights over Halloween, turning Circular Quay and The Rocks into a free, open-air party of looming spiders, giant tentacles, live music, DJs and several hundred thousand people dressed as things tht only come out when the veil between our world and the spirit world is at its thinnest.

On 30 and 31 October, George Street and the Overseas Passenger Terminal will close to traffic from 7pm until midnight, allowing revellers to wander the precinct end to end. No crossing streets full of cars wearing six-inch platforms and devil horns; just sandstone, harbour air and Sydney making an unearthly spectacle of itself.

Vincent Hernandez, founder of producer BBR Group and Creative Director of Ghost Festival, says the city’s appetite for Halloween was already ravenous.

“I don’t think we created that appetite. It was already there, but it simply didn’t have a giant free street celebration to bring everyone together the way other cities around the world do,” Hernandez told City Hub.

The festival drew 115,000 people in 2024 and 262,000 in 2025, with organisers expecting more than 300,000 this year. Late October hits a sweet spot: winter has loosened its grip and Sydney’s crushing number of summer events has not quite begun.

The Rocks is not simply a handsome backdrop. The festival takes its mythology from the precinct’s haunted histories, with each festival built around a local tale. 

This year belongs to Anne Kirkman, said to have kept rooms at the Hero of Waterloo on Lower Fort Street from 1849 — and, according to legend, never truly left. A piano is still said to play in the early hours, falling silent whenever somebody approaches.

“We are not inventing a haunted town from scratch,” Hernandez said. “The Rocks already has almost two centuries of stories, characters and legends sitting inside its own buildings. Our job is to take people to them.”

Across the festival, seven experiences will unfold through four realms spanning food and drink, horror, nightlife and family classics. Daytime brings the Halloween Market, roaming performers, street entertainment and family films at the Audible Ghost Cinema. As daylight drains from the laneways, the bars open, performances become stranger and the crowd shifts naturally towards the grown-ups in grotesque costumes.

“My test is simple,” Hernandez said. “If a five-year-old is crying at two in the afternoon, we have got it wrong. If nobody is a little nervous at 10 at night, we have also got it wrong.”

The program includes the Poliakov Vodka Haunted Woods, a food and drink village wrapped around a frozen forest and main stage; Casa Spirits Trick or Drink, a boozy riff on the childhood ritual; and the returning Casa Murder Bar, hidden inside the fiction of a spooky abandoned 1930s hotel.

Hernandez wants Ghost in the Rocks to eventually become a travel-worthy Halloween destination, but a wholly Sydney one: warm nights, mysterious bygone stories and the harbour glinting nearby, rather than another country’s celebration transplanted wholesale.

For locals, it offers the rare pleasure of seeing familiar streets slip their skin and get ookier. As Hernandez put it: “Give people the road and it becomes something else entirely.”

Ghost in The Rocks runs from 29 October to 1 November at Circular Quay and The Rocks. Entry to the street festival is free.