Who actually runs Halloween in Redondo Beach?
Ask that question in late October and you'll get three different answers, because there are three different answers. A woman who started a costume paddle out of boredom during lockdown organizes one event. The city's own Senior and Family Services department runs another, on the same body of water, a few hundred yards away. And a business district three blocks inland closes its main street to cars for a night, because that's good for the shops on it. None of these three groups coordinates with the others. None of them needs to. They're just all pointed at the same three-week stretch of calendar, packed into the same half-mile of coastline between King Harbor and Riviera Village.
Most write-ups about fall in Redondo Beach treat this as one continuous "Halloween season," a string of family-friendly bullet points. That flattens what's actually going on. This is a small city where three unrelated organizers, an individual, a municipal department, and a business improvement district, each decided independently that October needed its own event, and somehow none of them stepped on each other's dates. Understanding who's behind each one tells you more about how this town actually works than any generic list of pumpkin patches would.
A Teacher, a Facebook Post, and a Costume Contest on the Water
The South Bay Witches Paddle has no city department behind it and no storefront sponsoring it. It started in 2020 with a local teacher named Erin Hansen, who runs a shamanic healing practice called Aya Sol Center and had seen a similar event up the coast in Morro Bay. She didn't apply for a permit or pitch a business association. She posted in a Facebook group. As she later told Palos Verdes Pulse, "I said, 'Hey, anyone want to dress up like witches and go stand-up paddleboarding with me?'"
People showed up. Then more people showed up the next year, and the year after that. What began as a pandemic-era invitation to a handful of friends is now a standing October tradition in King Harbor, with participants gliding past the breakwater in witch costumes on paddleboards and kayaks, judged for best costume, and capped off with an after-party at Riviera Mexican Cantina. Hansen now coordinates directly with the Harbor Patrol and a local paddleboard rental outfit to keep the growing crowd safe on the water, which is a fair amount of institutional plumbing for something that started as one Facebook post.
By 2024 it was in its fifth year. By 2025, per an NBC Los Angeles writeup, it was in its sixth, drawing more than 60 costumed paddlers and kayakers to King Harbor. Following that arithmetic, this fall would put it in its seventh year, though the exact date moves from year to year and is worth confirming directly at witchespaddle.com before you plan around it. What hasn't moved is the character of the thing: grassroots, free to attend, built by one person's Facebook post and grown entirely by word of mouth.
The City's Version, Three Hundred Yards Away
Seaside Lagoon sits inside King Harbor, close enough to the Witches Paddle route that a spectator could plausibly watch both events without moving their car. It's a fully enclosed saltwater lagoon that the city fills with water drawn from just outside the breakwater, and its regular public swim season runs on a fixed municipal schedule. For 2026, the city's own Seaside Lagoon page put that window at Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, which means the lagoon's swim season already closed for the year back on September 7.
Weeks later, that same enclosed lagoon reopens for something entirely different: not swimming, but Pumpkins by the Sea, a family event run directly by the City of Redondo Beach's Senior and Family Services department. Last year's edition landed on a Saturday afternoon in late October, built around games, prizes, a costume parade, and a photo booth rather than a swim day, and it draws a different crowd than the paddle a few hundred yards away: strollers and small kids instead of costumed adults on paddleboards. Same facility, same corner of the harbor, completely different department and completely different audience, on a weekend afternoon rather than a weekend morning.
If you only follow the city's recreation calendar, you'll catch Pumpkins by the Sea and miss the Witches Paddle entirely, because the paddle isn't a city program. If you only follow Hansen's Instagram, the reverse is true. They share a body of water and a season, not a planning committee.
Catalina Avenue Closes for Business, Not for the City
The third host is neither an individual nor a city department. It's Riviera Village itself, the shopping and dining strip a few blocks south, organized through its own business association rather than through Redondo Beach's parks and recreation office. Its Halloween Trick-or-Treat is a street closure, not a lagoon event or a harbor paddle, and it runs on its own logic: keep foot traffic moving through the shops on Halloween night.
According to the Village's own 2026 event page, Catalina Avenue closes to traffic from Avenue I to South Elena Street for the evening, with shops handing out candy directly on the sidewalk. Parking is available in the triangle lot between Avenida Del Norte and South Elena Street, plus individual street spaces, and the Village is now steering visitors toward cashless paid parking at Plaza Riviera, at the corner of Catalina and Avenue I, with Apple Pay or Google Pay recommended for the fastest processing through the garage.
None of that infrastructure, the street closure permit, the parking arrangement, the candy-handout coordination, comes from the city's recreation budget or from Erin Hansen's Facebook group. It comes from a business district managing its own commercial corridor on the one night of the year when foot traffic through Riviera Village matters most.
Three Calendars, One Half-Mile Stretch
Put the three side by side and the picture that emerges isn't a single "Halloween in Redondo Beach." It's three organizers, an individual, a municipal department, and a business improvement district, running three events with three different funding sources, three different audiences, and three different registration processes, all inside walking distance of each other along the same stretch of coastline.
That's worth knowing if you actually live here, because it means no single newsletter or calendar covers all three. If you want to catch everything, you need three different sources, not one:
- The Witches Paddle: check witchespaddle.com directly, since it's independently run and not listed on the city's official calendar
- Pumpkins by the Sea: watch the City of Redondo Beach's Senior and Family Services listings, since it's a municipal program tied to Seaside Lagoon
- Riviera Village Trick-or-Treat: follow the Village's own site, since the closure and parking details come from the business district, not city recreation
None of this is a complaint about coordination. If anything, it says something good about the town. A resident with an idea can still post in a Facebook group and build a tradition that survives six or seven years without needing a city department's blessing. A municipal program can run a family event a few hundred feet from that same tradition without either one crowding the other out. And a business district can close its own street for one night without asking permission from either. Three different kinds of civic life, stacked on the same half-mile of coastline, each one running exactly the way its organizers wanted it to.
That layering, an individual's idea next to a city program next to a business district's own tradition, is part of what makes a town feel lived-in rather than programmed. It's the same texture that shows up in Redondo Beach's summer weekends, where a farmers market and a free concert series share a parking structure without sharing an organizer. October just runs the same pattern with witches instead of surfboards.
If you're already living in Redondo Beach, none of this changes your day-to-day life. But if you're the kind of person who notices how a town actually organizes itself, three separate hosts sharing one stretch of coastline without stepping on each other is a small, specific piece of evidence for what makes this particular corner of the South Bay work.
If you're weighing a move into this stretch of the South Bay, or just curious what a home nearby is worth in today's market, Amy Pearce can help. Get a Free Home Valuation to start the conversation.
