Last October, a handful of Conway business owners built plywood coffins, recruited four friends each to push them, and raced down Laurel Street for the first time. Nobody knew if it would happen again. This October, that same race has two divisions, a 16-team bracket, and a named track. Twelve months isn't long for a homemade festival stunt to grow rules. That speed says more about how Conway builds its Halloween season than any single event does on its own.
The Graveyard Grand Prix Coffin Races return to downtown Conway on Saturday, October 17, 2026, a week earlier on the calendar than last year's October 25 debut. If you're trying to figure out what's different this time around, or just want to know where to stand, here's what actually changed and why it matters if you live here.
The Race Got Structure It Didn't Have Last Year
The first Graveyard Grand Prix was one open field of teams competing for cash prizes in categories like fastest coffin, best design, and a tongue-in-cheek Dead Last award for the slowest finisher. It worked as a single, freewheeling afternoon of pushing plywood down a hill.
This year the Conway Chamber of Commerce split the event into two formal divisions. The Competitive Division is a 16-team double-elimination tournament, meaning teams race head to head all day until a bracket produces a single champion. The Spirit Division exists for teams who want to build something wild, wear a costume, and run a showcase heat without worrying about a stopwatch, judged instead on creativity, costume work, and how well they work the crowd.
Every team still needs five people to enter: one rider called "the Ghost," who sits in the coffin, and four pushers who steer it. Coffins have to have four wheels, a secure seat, and working steering, and they can't have motors or pedals of any kind. Every entry gets inspected before it's allowed to race. All participants must be at least 16.
The track has a name now too. The chamber's special events coordinator, Morgan McDonnell, calls it the Laurel Street Terror Track, roughly 600 feet of closed downtown street running downhill from the Town Green to the finish line. Last year's race description didn't need a name for the course because there wasn't yet a reason to treat it like permanent infrastructure. This year there is.
An Idea That Started as a Shrug
The most telling detail in all of this isn't the bracket. It's how casually the race began. McDonnell has said the whole thing started as an attempt to piggyback on Conway's Halloween momentum, not a carefully planned addition to the city calendar.
"We just were trying to get in on the action. It was just something we kind of thought up and started running with."
City Administrator Adam Emrick has drawn a similar line back to the outhouse races he watched as a kid in northwestern Pennsylvania. The chamber has also pointed to Manitou Springs, Colorado, where the Emma Crawford Coffin Races have run for more than three decades, as the model they borrowed the format from.
What's worth noticing is the gap between how the idea arrived and how fast the city treated it as something permanent. McDonnell has said the plan is to make it an annual fixture of Conway's Halloween season, and the jump from a loose one-off race to a divisioned, bracketed tournament with a named track happened in a single year. That's not how most small towns run their new traditions. Usually a festival stays informal for several seasons before anyone bothers naming the course or building a tournament structure around it. Conway skipped that waiting period.
The Race Is One Piece of a Bigger Machine
None of this happens in isolation. Conway's "City of Halloween" branding started in 2022 as what city officials themselves have described as a gimmick meant to generate seasonal buzz for downtown businesses. Four years later it's the reason a coffin race exists at all, and the growth numbers explain why the city keeps adding to it. Conway's Halloween displays and events drew roughly a quarter million visitors in October 2024, and that turnout has been climbing by about 50,000 people a year since the rebrand began, according to city spokesperson June Wood.
That kind of growth changes what the season looks like on the ground. Downtown's Halloween display now includes named attractions built up over multiple years, among them the Tunnel of Bones, Shiverfront Park, the Town Scream, Haunted Harbor, the Shiverwalk, Haunted City Hall, and the Witch's Garden. For the 2025 season alone, more than 100 volunteers turned out to help restore and build the decorations, and the city added a Wizard of Oz theme running through parts of downtown, including a projection of a carved likeness of Mayor Barbara Jo Blain's face rigged to look like the ghostly floating head from the film, plus a skeleton marching band dressed in Coastal Carolina University teal. That's the kind of addition that shows up nearly every year now, which is exactly why a bracketed coffin race fits right in this time around.
The coffin race fits into that pattern instead of standing apart from it. Once the city commits to growing the Halloween season every year, individual pieces of it, whether that's a new decoration, a new volunteer program, or a new race, tend to get built with permanence in mind from the start. That's the actual reason this year's race has a bracket. It's not because coffin racing suddenly demanded more structure. It's because Conway has learned that whatever gets added to October now gets added to stay.
What to Know Before You Go
If you're planning to watch rather than race, a few practical things haven't changed and a couple have.
- The race starts at the Town Green, 200 Laurel Street, with the course running downhill along a closed stretch of Laurel Street toward the finish.
- Expect live music, local food trucks, and Halloween-themed vendors running throughout the afternoon, the same lineup of extras that made last year's event feel like a street festival rather than just a race.
- Team entry runs $50, and the chamber caps registration and works from a waitlist once it fills, so signing up early matters more than showing up race day and hoping for a slot.
- If you want a lower-stakes viewing experience, the Spirit Division's showcase runs are built for exactly that. There's no bracket pressure, just costumes, crowd interaction, and teams built for flair over speed.
- Because Laurel Street closes for the event, plan around downtown Conway rather than through it if you're not headed there specifically.
The one thing that genuinely repeats from last year is the tone. This is still a race built on plywood, borrowed lumber, and whatever creative liberties a team of five people take with a coffin design. The bracket didn't change that. It just gave the chaos a scoreboard.
If you've lived in Conway long enough to remember when "City of Halloween" was just a phrase on a banner, this is the same instinct at work again: something small gets tried, it works, and within a year it has a name, a structure, and a plan to come back bigger. That's been true of the decorations, the volunteer program, and now the coffin race. Worth watching for what shows up with a bracket next.
Kirk Stalvey grew up in Conway and has watched this town's October turn from a few pumpkins on the Town Green into one of the region's biggest seasonal draws. If you're weighing a move to Conway, curious what a home near downtown actually costs during a season like this one, or just want to talk about the town with someone who's local, Kirk Stalvey is easy to reach and always happy to talk shop, real estate or otherwise.
