You show up at the back of the house because that's where the check-in table is, not the front door with the wraparound porch everyone photographs. A volunteer hands you a slip of paper with a time on it. First come, first served, she says. Come back at your slot.
If you did this in early October, you got a scavenger hunt sheet and became a certified junior ghost hunter. If you came back two weeks later for what you assumed was the same thing, you got a room with the lights off and someone telling you what the Montana Paranormal Society found in the attic. Same house. Same red sandstone walls on the corner of Division and Clark. Completely different night.
That's the thing nobody mentions when they say the Moss Mansion "does something for Halloween." It doesn't run one seasonal event. It runs four, stacked across October, built for four different kinds of visitor, and treating them as interchangeable is how you end up standing in the wrong line with the wrong expectations.
The mansion behind the events
Before the costumes and cocktail stations, it helps to know what building all this is happening inside. Preston B. Moss built the 25-room red sandstone house in 1902 and 1903, when the site sat some distance from the growing city of Billings rather than in the middle of it. He hired New York architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, the same architect behind the original Waldorf Astoria and Plaza hotels, and decorated the interior with mahogany and walnut woodwork, an onyx fireplace, and stained glass that's still there. The house never changed hands after the Moss family, which is part of why it looks nearly the same today as it did the year it was finished. It's on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Billings Preservation Society has run it as a museum since the last family member passed away.
That history matters here for a practical reason. Every one of these October events is a fundraiser. The mansion is not a city-owned attraction with a fixed operating budget. It's a nonprofit house museum on a residential corner in downtown Billings, and the money from a $15 kids' scavenger hunt or a cocktail ticket goes directly to keeping a 120-year-old sandstone building standing. If you live nearby, the Halloween calendar isn't just entertainment. It's part of how a landmark on your street stays open.
The four nights, and who they're actually for
The daytime one, for kids under 14. Early in October, the mansion runs Family Ghost Tours, marketed as a chance to become a "junior ghost hunter." It's self-guided: kids get a worksheet, roam the house at their own pace, and complete a scavenger hunt to earn their certification. Tickets run $15 per person, the format runs from 5 to 8 p.m., and it's walk-up only, with last entry around 7:15 to leave time to actually explore. This is the version built for families who want their kid to remember Halloween as a house full of clues, not a house full of scares.
The evening one, for adults who want atmosphere over adrenaline. Later in the month, the mansion runs actual Ghost Tours, and this is a different production entirely. The lights go off. Guests walk through the history of the house while staff and volunteers share stories collected over years, layered with findings from multiple Montana Paranormal Society investigations. In recent seasons the format has run across three separate evenings in mid to late October, with three time slots each night, which leaves room to pick a slot that doesn't collide with a weeknight commitment. It's the closest thing to a traditional ghost tour Billings has, run inside a house old enough to have earned its stories honestly.
The costume one, for a night out rather than a scare. The mansion's cocktail crawl, known as Witches and Wizards Spirits, is a five-station experience through the house and grounds, each station built around a different witch theme, from classic Salem history to whatever pop culture witch is having a moment that year. There's a costume contest around 7 p.m., judged by a panel of vendors, and the format has consistently run in the $50s per ticket in past seasons, with the check-in happening at the back of the property rather than the front. This one shows up on the mansion's own event calendar for the same late-September-through-October window as everything else, so anyone who wants exact timing should check the mansion's site directly before making plans, since the specific date shifts slightly year to year.
The haunted-house one, which is a completely different animal. Separate from all three of the above, the mansion also hosts Haunted Moss, a full horror production with a Horror Theater piece called Asylum, a haunted maze called Labyrinth, and a midnight showing of Asylum with bonus scenes for anyone who wants the later, more intense version. Tickets for the main tours are sold at the door, first come first served, while the midnight show requires an actual reservation. This is the one built for people who want to be scared, not soothed by history. Proceeds from this one go to the mansion's preservation fund the same as the others, which means even the version built purely for thrills is still, underneath it, a fundraiser for a National Register building.
Picking the right night
If you're taking a kid who's more interested in solving clues than being frightened, the daytime scavenger hunt in the first week of October is the one to book. If you want to hear the house's actual documented history told with the lights off, the mid to late October ghost tours are built for that, and having three separate nights each with three time slots means there's usually a slot that fits an already-busy October calendar. If the plan is a date night or a group outing where the costume is half the fun, the cocktail crawl is the only one of the four with a social, standing-around-with-a-drink format. And if the goal is an actual scare, with actors and a maze and a midnight option, that's Haunted Moss, and it's worth knowing going in that it shares nothing in format with the quieter ghost tours held earlier in the month.
What ties all four together is that they're not really about Halloween as a genre. They're about a specific building that's been standing on Division Street since before most of the surrounding neighborhood existed, still funded room by room by the people who show up for its stories. The scavenger hunt and the ghost tour both feed the same fund that keeps the original woodwork, stained glass, and family furnishings on display for the mansion's educational tours and community partnerships the rest of the year. The cocktail crawl and the haunted house, different as they are from each other, both end up doing the same job: keeping a 1903 house solvent enough to open its doors again next October.
Check the mansion's own event calendar before you plan around any of these, since exact dates and prices can shift slightly from what ran last season, and the family and ghost tour dates in particular are limited to specific nights rather than running the full month.
If you've walked past this house a hundred times on your way somewhere else and never actually gone inside, October is the month it stops being scenery. Heidi Brosovich and the Brosovich Real Estate Team work Billings neighborhoods where landmarks like this one are part of daily life, not just a backdrop, and we're always glad to talk about what makes a specific block worth knowing before you ever think about buying on it.
