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Guides
12 viral Halloween costumes that are so 2026
Show up as a broken AI image, six fingers and the tell-tale extra hand. Or what about a World Cup jersey (or the duck who never got in). Of course, there's always the Storrowed truck, which you know everyone gets. Beacon Hill is where a bad costume goes to die. Last year the city shut Mount Vernon, Pinckney, and a pile of other streets from 4 to 7:30 p.m. so the trick-or-treat crowd could take them over. The Beacon Hill Times ran the list. Brick, cobblestones, and someone asking what you are. Miranda has already rejected your costume. Silver hair, huge sunglasses, a coat that looks like rent. Andy is tall boots and a good coat. Emily is allowed to insult both of you, and someone has to carry the coats all night. The Devil Wears Prada 2 put Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci back together, and it is on Hulu and Disney+. It made about $693 million, so people will know who you are. A cape on the Green Line. Matt Damon is Odysseus, Anne Hathaway is Penelope, Zendaya is Athena, and Charlize Theron is Calypso. Circe is Samantha Morton. Do not show up as Circe and then argue. Linen, leather, gold, and sandals you can walk in. Odysseus gets the sword. Athena gets the helmet. Calypso gets to look dangerous. Couples can be Odysseus and Penelope. Ten years apart is optional. The movie has already passed $1.7 billion. Extra hand. Six fingers. A shirt with letters that almost spell words. A name tag that says Regenerate. The worse it looks, the clearer it is. One shoe should be a different size. An arm can come out of the wrong place. Bring a framed photo of yourself that does not look like you. You can start this at 6 p.m. and still be right. Diamond bones down to your fingers, a feathered coat, and a crown that will not survive the bar. Beyoncé wore it to the Met Gala in May, her first time back in a decade. Vogue has the arrival, Olivier Rousteing dress included. A black or nude bodysuit and silver bones will get you there. Rhinestones if you are patient. The coat is what keeps it from looking like last October. A hockey jersey will not get a second look in Boston. The name on it has to. Briar University, from Prime Video’s Off Campus. Jersey, stick, athletic shorts. The specific versions are better. Allie’s Shakespeare look is a blue corset, a satin dress, and fairy wings. The couple is Hannah’s bunny and Garrett’s magician, not Allie’s. Teen Vogue laid those out. Cowboy boots, flared jeans, big hair, a western shirt, and something that says Choosin’ Texas. Without the words, you are dressed for a country bar. Ella Langley’s song spent 23 weeks at No. 1, the longest run in Hot 100 history. A couple can split it. One person chooses Texas. The other one looks left. The costume people will understand is a national team jersey, a scarf, and a tiny trophy. Gillette hosted seven World Cup matches, including a quarterfinal, under the name Boston Stadium. CBS Boston has the list. Couples wear rival teams. The costume people will stop for is Merlín, the duck in a miniature Mexico jersey. Reuters followed him to a meeting with the president. He was still a duck. He did not get into the stadium. Stage clothes, the hair, the weapons. One of them works. All three work better. KPop Demon Hunters was already Netflix’s biggest movie, and Netflix ordered a sequel. Official HUNTR/X costumes exist, which beats building the whole thing out of metallic fabric after midnight. Woody, Jessie, and Buzz are the easy version. Lilypad is the one that dates it. She is the tablet in Toy Story 5, voiced by Greta Lee. Build a frame, put your face in it, and spend the night interrupting people. Disney said the opening was the biggest global debut of the year. Moana needs the necklace. Maui needs the hook, the skirt, the wig, and tattoos that were printed. A friend with a marker, after drinks, is not a plan. Catherine Lagaʻaia plays Moana. Dwayne Johnson is Maui again. The live-action movie opened July 10. It is a duo. Moana still does most of the work. Peach’s skirt has to be a problem on the T. Pink dress, crown, white gloves. Mario is overalls, a red cap, and a mustache. Rosalina makes it a group. A cardboard pipe makes every doorway a fight. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie put them back in theaters this year, so the closet version looks current again. Build a moving truck out of cardboard, crush the roof, and write Storrow Drive on the side. It reads as Boston from across the street, and it will take up a Beacon Hill sidewalk. Trucks keep hitting the low bridges on Storrow Drive, Soldiers Field Road, and Memorial Drive. The state calls it Storrowing.
Haunted places in Boston
Boston has been accumulating dead people since 1630, so the ghost stories had time to pile up. The places are real, ghosts, possibly. Harvey D. Parker opened the hotel in 1855. The hotel has published the ghost stories. In a 1992 Boston Globe interview quoted by the hotel, bellman John Brehm said he first heard about Parker’s ghost when he started work in 1941. The story then was that Parker roamed the 10th-floor annex. Around 1950, a guest said she saw a heavyset man with a black mustache in that hall. Security went up and found nobody. Other reports from that floor are a rocking chair in a room that does not have one, and lights moving down the corridor. In a separate story, a mother and daughter in room 1012 said a man in old clothes stood at the foot of the bed and then vanished. At breakfast, his portrait was hanging in the dining room. The granite building beside Massachusetts General Hospital was the Charles Street Jail, finished in 1851. In 1973, after prisoners revolted over the conditions, a court found the jail in violation of the inmates’ constitutional rights. The last prisoners left on Memorial Day weekend in 1990. It reopened as The Liberty Hotel in 2007. The rotunda, the catwalks, and some of the cells are still there. CLINK. serves dinner in the old cells. Alibi is in the former drunk tank. Ghost tours describe footsteps and former prisoners. The hotel’s own history does not. The theater opened in 1903. The stories that get repeated are a well-dressed couple in the balcony, a little girl who supposedly takes gifts left for her, and a former mayor who died in his seat during a performance. There is no record of a Boston mayor dying at the Majestic. People who have worked in the building still describe a man in a suit in the balcony lobby, and a child’s voice in the house. The restaurant opened in 1826, in a building that was already old. During the Revolution the second floor was headquarters for Ebenezer Hancock, paymaster of the Continental Army, and soldiers were paid where people now eat. Staff have talked about flickering lights, electronics that quit, footsteps, and a man in colonial clothes bent over a desk. Tour guides say that man is Hancock. A separate story involves a chef named Henry, seen by a coworker around the time Henry died. John F. Kennedy’s booth is upstairs, with a plaque. Ghost tours add a Kennedy haunting. The restaurant’s history page mentions the booth and stops there. Photo by Robert Linsdell King’s Chapel Burying Ground opened in 1630. It is the oldest burying ground in Boston proper. It filled up, and in 1660 the town opened the Granary Burying Ground nearby. Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and the Boston Massacre victims are there, along with thousands of people who no longer have a stone. Both grounds are regular stops on ghost tours. Visitors report footsteps, cold spots, and someone in colonial clothes who is not leading a tour. The sightings are not verified. Fort Warren is on Georges Island in Boston Harbor. Construction ran from 1833 to 1861, and during the Civil War the fort held Confederate prisoners. The ghost story is the Lady in Black. In the version Boston Harbor Islands tells, she is Melanie Lanier, who rowed to the island to free her husband Andrew, a Confederate prisoner, and was hanged in black. Historians have not found a record of her. Edward Rowe Snow is the one who spread the tale. Georges Island is a ferry ride. Check whether the boats are running before you go.
Get to know Boston
4 Boston-area gangster hangouts with brutal backstories
The Winter Hill Gang once conducted business in a Somerville garage that now welcomes a church congregation. On Prince Street, Mafia associates talked inside an apartment while the FBI recorded them. In South Boston, a couple opened a liquor store and soon found themselves being told to hand it over by men threatening to kill them. Boston mob headquarters were a first-floor apartment on Prince Street, a liquor store on Old Colony Avenue whose owners kept saying no, and two garages, one later filmed by state police and one now used as a church. The North End headquarters with microphones in the walls 98 Prince Street, North End Gennaro Angiulo and his associates used a first-floor apartment at 98 Prince Street as a Mafia headquarters. From January 19 to May 3, 1981, the FBI recorded the conversations through hidden microphones, and a concealed camera outside photographed people coming and going so the voices on the tapes had faces. Those recordings became evidence in federal court. An FBI supervisory special agent later told the Senate that one slice of the Angiulo family's numbers business was bringing in $30,000 a day. For nearly a year before those tapes, the FBI could not get video of the address. People nearby reported suspected investigators to the Angiulos, often with a license plate, and they were usually right. Across 103 days of pictures, someone brought the brothers a new car or a new face on nearly every day. Agents hid a camera in a vehicle and changed that vehicle every evening. They were not spotted. The liquor store Whitey Bulger refused to take no for 295 Old Colony Avenue, South Boston Stephen Rakes and Julie Rakes opened Stippo's Liquor Mart in 1983. Julie later used the name Julie Rakes Dammers. In January 1984, James "Whitey" Bulger, Stephen Flemmi, and Kevin Weeks let themselves into the family's South Boston home. Bulger said they had been paid to kill Rakes and had decided to buy the store instead. Rakes said it was not for sale. Bulger said he would be their partner. Rakes refused that, too. They were back that evening. They sat at the kitchen table, showed a gun and a switchblade, and threatened to kill him. Flemmi picked up the couple's one-year-old daughter, stroked her hair, and said it would be a shame for her not to see her father again. Bulger handed Rakes a paper bag with roughly $65,000 and promised $25,000 more, which he later refused to pay. Flemmi said the store had new owners. The First Circuit's account of the extortion lays out that visit. The Rakeses held out for weeks, left for Florida, and came back still trying to keep the business. Julie's uncle, Boston police detective Joseph Lundbohm, asked FBI agent John Connolly for help. Connolly told Bulger. Bulger then told Rakes to make Lundbohm back off, and the family signed the title over. The store was at 295 Old Colony Avenue. Public records show Kevin Weeks bought the property. In May 1986 the building was sold to Weeks, Bulger, and another person, and South Boston Liquor Mart, Inc. was set up to do business there. The shop was also known as Columbia Wine and Spirits and by its original name, Stippo's Liquor Mart. A federal forfeiture appeal is where the address and the 1986 company are traced. The garage where the afternoon visitors weren't coming for repairs Lancaster Street, near the former Boston Garden Mechanics had the Lancaster Street Garage in the morning. Most days around 1:30 p.m., Bulger and Flemmi arrived, Bulger in a black 1979 Chevy that he pulled into a bay, and the visitors came for them rather than for a repair. Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill describe that routine in Black Mass. George Kaufman, who had operated Marshall Motors in Somerville as a front for Howie Winter, ran this garage for the two of them. They had moved the meetings downtown, a short walk from 98 Prince Street and a couple of blocks from Boston Garden. Massachusetts State Police filmed Bulger there in 1980. The Justice Department still has the footage. The Winter Hill headquarters that became a church 12 Marshall Street, Somerville Marshall Motors, at 12 Marshall Street in Somerville, was the garage they left behind. Kaufman ran it as a front for Howie Winter, and the back room is where Winter, John Martorano, and Bulger met. The Boston Globe described the place as the Winter Hill Gang's office for gambling and loansharking. James Sousa was killed there in October 1974, after other gangsters worried he would talk to police about a botched plan to rip off a dentist with a fake gold sale. A mobster, remembering the room years later, said, "There was blood everywhere." A church bought the building in 2008. In May 2026 the Globe found it open as Greater Works Church of God Somerville. Reporter Danny McDonald went to a Sunday service and found purple seats, screens welcoming worshippers, and a mural of people being baptized in a river. Rev. Collin Green led the prayers. After the service he brought up Howie Winter on his own. "It's changed," he said. "It's not that way. God is in the building."
Weird, Boston squares are almost never squares
Copley Square used to be triangular. Kenmore Square is a pile-up of roads. A small intersection with a memorial sign can be a square too. Boston squares have a lot in common. A reliable shape is not one of those things. The name usually tells you what a place does. People meet there, roads come together there, businesses cluster there, or someone is remembered there. It does not promise four equal sides. If you expect every square to look like an enclosed plaza, you will keep looking for a plaza that was never part of the plan. Some squares also name more than the space in the middle. Tell someone you are meeting in Kenmore and you have named a destination. You have not told them where to stand. Boston squares are places before they’re shapes The city’s Complete Streets guidelines treat streets as public space for people walking, biking, taking transit, and driving. Squares make those competing jobs obvious. Someone wants to cross. Someone wants a bus. Someone wants to sit down without being in either person’s way. A square can be a destination and a route through somewhere else. That is why Boston squares do not always come with a lawn. The meeting point may be the intersection itself, with useful places on the edges. The histories of individual squares are more useful than one origin story for all of them. Copley and Kenmore got to their present forms by different routes. So did a lot of Boston’s streets. Copley really was a triangle According to the city’s landmark report for the Boston Public Library, Copley Square began as a triangular lot at Huntington Avenue, Dartmouth Street, and Boylston Street. Boston bought that parcel in 1883. It bought a second triangle two years later. Huntington Avenue ran between them. The road stayed there until 1968, so the awkward geometry was not a drafting error that lasted a season. Sasaki, which won a 1960s design competition, describes that first park as a shift from a grassy triangle bordered by traffic to a civic plaza next to Trinity Church. A later redesign brought the space level with the sidewalks. A renovation the city marked as complete in 2026 added accessible paths, shaded seating, and work on the fountain. The name survived all of it. A square can keep its identity while the ground plan changes. Kenmore grew around movement Boston University’s history of Kenmore Square describes a commercial crossroads shaped by transport and hotels. Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue meet there. Trolleys and nearby railroads brought people who needed a place to stay. The area was called Governor’s Square before the Kenmore name stuck. The Hotel Kenmore supplied the later name. Hotels, automobile businesses, and the crowds heading to Fenway defined the place, not a formal garden or an enclosed court. That history is a useful check on the idea that every square began as a sitting room someone designed on purpose. Kenmore’s job was getting people somewhere. The identity followed the traffic. Some squares are memorials Boston’s Hero Squares program is even blunter about shape. A Hero Square is a square or intersection dedicated to a service member killed in action. The city says the first one, Dewey Square at South Station, was named in 1898. More than 1,200 have been dedicated since. You do not need a park, a fountain, or four surrounding buildings. Families can apply. Veterans Services works with Transportation and Public Works on the placards. There is a searchable database. The gold star on the sign is reserved for those killed in action. Next time you pass a square that seems to consist of a sign and a crosswalk, read the name. You may be at a memorial, not at a failed attempt to build a plaza.