Boo! at the Zoo

About This Event

Boo! at the Zoo is Brookfield Zoo's Halloween answer — trick-or-treating stations, inflatables, and costume parades woven into a regular zoo visit, included with admission and free for members, running most of October.

The zoo itself has a genuinely unusual origin for the era. It opened July 1, 1934, on 80 acres donated back in 1919 by Edith Rockefeller McCormick (John D. Rockefeller's daughter), and it became the first zoo in America to ditch cages in favor of moats and ditches separating animals from visitors — a real innovation at the time, not just a design choice. It went on to other firsts too: the first American zoo to exhibit giant pandas, the nation's first fully indoor dolphin exhibit in 1960, and Tropic World, one of the first fully indoor rainforest simulations, in the 1980s.

Worth knowing before you go: hours differ by day (10 AM–5 PM weekdays, 10 AM–6 PM weekends), and it's included with regular zoo admission rather than a separate ticketed event, so no extra planning required beyond a normal zoo trip.