If you’re looking to avoid the standard Halloween at all costs and up for a more “urbanist” experience, we’ve rounded up some events for city nerds.

Costumed Halloween Twilight Tour at the Newtown Creek Digester Eggs

This unique tour, which includes prizes for best costumes, will take place at 6pm on Halloween at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. The piece de resistance will be the illuminated digester eggs that convert sludge into water, carbon dioxide, and methane gas, and eventually use those to make fertilizer.

Interested? RSVP by sending an email to events@dep.nyc.gov

Pumpkin Impalement in Cobble Hill

The Pumpkin Impalement, organized by artist Jane Greengold in Cobble Hill, features 100 unique pumpkins impaled on a fence on the corner of Kane and Strong. This is the final Halloween that the pumpkin impalement will take place at this location so check it out between 3:00 and 7:00 p.m. on Halloween.

Woodlawn Conservancy Sacred Departed Tour

The Woodlawn Conservancy group is offering a Halloween experience focused on the dead with their Sacred Departed tour of Woodlawn Cemetary in the Bronx. A combination of outdoor tour and theater takes you from the cemetery’s Belmont mausoleum to the Woolworth family mausoleum while actors play those buried there. The tour begins on Halloween at 7:00 p.m. at the Jerome Avenue entrance and costs $20 for members and students ($25 if you are neither).

Gothic Literature Reading at the Merchant’s House Museum

Parlors set for a Victorian funeral in a house standing since 1832 make the perfect setting for dramatic readings from 19th century Gothic literature. The Merchant’s House Museum is holding this spooky event the night of Halloween. Tickets are $25 for non-members and $15 for members.

Boroughs of the Dead Historical Tour

Image source: Boroughs of the Dead. <

On October 30, Boroughs of the Dead is offering a frightful tour of the East Village and Greenwich Village. We previously covered their tour of haunted spots of lower Manhattan. The group will will meet in from of St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery from where horror author Andrea Janes will lead you to the sites of verified ghost stories that include murder scenes, burial grounds, and the sites of public executions.  The 7:30 tour is sold out, but there is still room on the 7:45 one. Tickets cost $25 in advance, $20 at the door.

For those of you wanting to taste a bit more fear this Halloween, we recommend something slightly closer to the Blackout Haunted House which we braved last year.