Every fall, a Saturday afternoon on Forrest and Haverford Avenues turns into something closer to a small logistics operation than a party. Thirteen witches go up in storefront windows across downtown Narberth. Kids fan out from the corner where the two streets meet, working their way from shop to shop until they've spotted every one, then loop back to collect a Halloween prize. Costumes are optional. The treats along the way are not.
It reads, on paper, like a small-town Halloween tradition and nothing more. But the mechanics of it say something more specific about how downtown Narberth actually operates, and why a half-square-mile business district keeps a full calendar of these events running year after year.
Thirteen Windows, Two Streets
The rules of Witches of Narberth are unusually precise for a kids' event. There are exactly thirteen witches. They're hidden in windows, not handed out at a booth. Families start at the corner of Forrest and Haverford, and the only way to finish is to walk the length of the business district checking storefronts as you go, collecting treats from participating shops along the route.
That structure means the hunt cannot be won from one location. A family can't stand at the starting corner and wait for witches to come to them. The format forces foot traffic past every business willing to put a witch in its window, not just the two or three shops closest to the start. Narberth Borough describes its own downtown as covering roughly half a square mile, which is exactly the scale that makes a shop-to-shop hunt work on foot in an afternoon. Try the same format in a commercial strip five times that size and the hunt stops being a stroll and starts being a car trip.
The event is organized by the Narberth Business Association, the same group that runs Narberth Online and coordinates the borough's retail directory. It isn't a municipal recreation department program. It's the merchants themselves building an afternoon that puts kids in front of their windows.
One Event on a Longer Calendar
Witches of Narberth isn't a standalone fixture. It's one entry on a full year of recurring, business-district-wide programming that the same association runs on a set rhythm.
| Season | Event | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| March | Leprechaun Hunt | Kids start at the "Blarney" Booth at Haverford and Forrest and search downtown for ten hidden leprechauns, each one worth a chocolate coin |
| Spring | Easter Egg Hunt | Seasonal hunt through the same downtown footprint |
| June and September | Narberth Music & Arts Festival | Live music and food on Haverford Avenue, an Artist's Alley maker's market along Forrest Avenue, running for more than twenty years |
| Summer | NarBark Dog Parade, July 4th Fireworks | Narberth's Independence Day tradition dates back more than 75 years, to 1942 |
| Monthly | First Fridays | Recurring evening event through the retail district |
| October | Witches of Narberth, Halloween Parade | Scavenger hunt followed by the borough's parade and trick-or-treating |
| December | Dickens Festival | Downtown Narberth staged as 1840s London, with street vendors, carriage rides, and period performers |
Look at the format underneath each one. The Leprechaun Hunt uses the identical shop-to-shop search mechanic as the Halloween event, just with ten targets instead of thirteen and a different holiday theme. The Music & Arts Festival spreads people across the same two streets at the same time rather than sequentially, but it still uses Forrest for one function and Haverford for another. First Fridays repeats the whole exercise monthly, indefinitely.
None of these are one-off promotions built around a single anchor business. They're a repeating system that keeps circulating people through the full width of downtown, month after month, holiday after holiday. A Saturday built around thirteen hidden witches turns out to be a smaller version of the same idea that built the June festival, the March hunt, and the December street fair.
What the Same Weekend Looks Like
Witches of Narberth is also positioned deliberately inside a bigger Halloween sequence. It runs earlier in the day, from roughly 1 to 4 p.m., and wraps up before the borough's Halloween Parade and evening trick-or-treating begin. Over the past several years the scavenger hunt has landed on the last Saturday or two before Halloween itself, sometimes October 25, sometimes the 26th or 27th, depending on how the calendar falls that year. Narberth Online confirms the current year's exact date and hours before the event.
That sequencing matters more than it looks like it should. The hunt gets families downtown, walking past every shop, in daylight, hours before the parade and trick-or-treating draw the same families back out again after dark. One Saturday in late October effectively produces two separate waves of foot traffic through the same storefronts, with the scavenger hunt doing the daytime work.
A Few Things Worth Knowing Before You Go
- The hunt starts at the corner of Forrest and Haverford Avenues, and that's also where you return to collect the final Halloween prize.
- Prizes run out. The hunt is scheduled to run until 4 p.m., but organizers have said in past years that it ends earlier if the prizes are gone first.
- Check windows, not just doors. The witches are placed to be visible from the sidewalk, so the hunt rewards a slower walk rather than a fast one.
- Costumes are welcome but not required, so this isn't a trick-or-treat substitute, it's a separate daytime event that happens to lead into one.
- Confirm the date and hours on Narberth Online before you head out, since the Saturday it lands on shifts slightly from year to year.
None of this requires advance planning beyond checking a date. What it rewards is knowing the shape of the afternoon: a walk, not a stop, through a downtown built at exactly the scale that makes the walk worth taking.
If you're the kind of Narberth resident who already has this Saturday circled, you probably also know how much of the borough's daily rhythm runs through that same half square mile. The Damon Michels Team spends its time in these same few blocks, and we're always glad to talk through what's changing downtown, witches included.
