Halloween: Which Doors Are Open Tonight?

Posted: 2026 | Category: Community

A Street Full of Dark Windows

It is half past five on the thirty-first of October. A witch, a ghost and a skeleton are standing on the pavement with empty buckets, and a parent is holding a phone that cannot tell them a thing.

Somewhere in the village, a grandmother has a bowl of sweets on the hall table and the porch light on. Three streets further, a family went all out: smoke machine, a coffin in the front garden, two kilos of chocolate. Neither of them will see half the children they bought for, because nobody knows they are there.

And the children ring at houses where nobody is home, or worse, where nobody wanted to be rung at.

An elderly woman smiling in her front door with a bowl of sweets, three lit jack-o'-lanterns on the step She bought sweets for forty children. The question is whether forty children will find her door.

Belgian Halloween is not American Halloween. There is no unspoken rule that a carved pumpkin means “ring here”. It is a few streets that join in, scattered across a town, and the information about which ones lives in a WhatsApp group that half the parents are not in.

A Pumpkin Means Ring Here

So we made the rule explicit, and put it on a map.

Residents add their house with the hours their door is open. That is it: an address, a time, and if they like, their own icon instead of the pumpkin. No password to remember; a magic link in their email is enough. The organiser of the town approves the house, or switches on auto-approval and trusts the neighbours.

On the night itself, the map tells families everything they need at a glance:

  • A burning pumpkin means the door is open right now. Ring.
  • A carved pumpkin that is not lit yet means it opens later this evening.
  • A grey one means the family ran out of sweets, or had to go out after all. They switch it off from their phone, and nobody rings in vain.

A father in a scarf showing a phone to a little witch and a ghost under a streetlamp The map answers the only question that matters at half past five: where now?

Families can star the doors they want to visit and ask for the shortest walking route past all of them. Afterwards they tick off where they have been and rate each house from one to five pumpkins, which is the most honest review system we have ever built.

Bigger venues get their own marker. A scare walk, a haunted garage, the café handing out soup: hotspots show up with a flame and a photo, so they stand out from the front doors.

One Town, Then Two

Halloween started as one site for one village: Deerlijk, built in September and live within a few days. Then Kuurne asked.

So every town now has its own address, its own artwork and its own organisers: halloween.in-deerlijk.be and halloween.in-kuurne.be each show their own village, with their own church on the hero image. Underneath, it is one application. A new town is a new community with a boundary drawn on the map, not a new deployment. The glue.blue overview shows every participating town at once.

A cobbled Kuurne street at night with trick-or-treaters walking toward the Sint-Michielskerk Each town gets its own backdrop. Kuurne’s has its own church in it.

A digital map only works if people know it exists, and the people who need to know it exist are standing at the school gate, not reading websites. So the posters and flyers come out of the same system: an A4 poster and two A5 flyers per sheet, generated per town with the right name, date and QR code, ready to print and push through letterboxes.

Built Like Everything Else We Build

It is a seasonal app for a single evening a year, and it is built like our year-round products: a multi-tenant Fastify and React application on the same platform as Konvoi and RestoLoop, with an approval workflow, map clustering so the pins stay readable when a whole street joins, and privacy-friendly analytics in our own Pulsetrack.

That is the point, really. When the boring parts are solved once, a fun idea goes from “wouldn’t it be nice” to live in two towns before the pumpkins are carved.

Results

  • Live in two towns: Deerlijk and Kuurne, each on its own address
  • From idea to live in days, on the shared Glueblue platform
  • No passwords for residents: an address, the hours, a magic link
  • Printed promotion generated per town: posters and flyers with QR code
  • Shortest walking route past every door you want to visit

Want your town on the map next year, or have a seasonal idea of your own? Let’s talk.