Every day in Westfield, whispers can be heard about the town’s creepiest, kookiest, most mysterious and spookiest former resident: Addams Family creator Charles Addams. There’s the mansion on Elm Street, which bears a striking resemblance to the famed Addams Family house that Addams created; the Presbyterian Church Burial Grounds, a source of inspiration for him; and remnants of Addams’ early scrawls that are on display. But every October, the town fully transforms into a celebration of the iconic cartoonist’s legacy by hosting AddamsFest.
The annual festival, started in 2018, blends art, history and Halloween throughout the month of October. Suburban homes turn into haunted houses through a town-wide decorating contest, local artists are given a spotlight in an Addams-inspired mural gallery on Central Avenue, and special events highlight the year’s unique theme. This year’s festivities will run October 8-29.
“The point of AddamsFest is to build bridges across our community and give people something to be proud of that’s uniquely their own,” says Adrian Pastore, producer of the festival. “It’s a day of joy for people to come together and celebrate everything that’s great about our town.”
This year, the festival has a “Femme Fatale” theme, focusing on the mystique of the female characters in Addams’s work. This will culminate in an art exhibition called Femme Fatale: Morticia Addams and More, running weekends from October 10-26. Original works by Addams, on loan from the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation, and pieces by local artists are being featured in the gallery show.
A town-favorite event, Charlie’s Ale Garden, sees residents pack into the Westfield Armory for live music played by local bands, paired with beer, wine, games and food trucks. Another popular event, Addams Family Fun Day, turns Quimby Street into a spectacle of giant bubbles, live music, crafts, and booths from local businesses.
One recurring attraction, Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, has been a mainstay at Addams Family Fun Day since the beginning. Founded by friends Chris Soria and Marc Evan, the company uses pumpkins as canvases, carving all sorts of designs to fit AddamsFest’s yearly theme. “A lot of people really appreciate the artwork,” Soria says. “It’s a great opportunity for us to share our craft with people.”
A Morticia-and-Gomez-themed masquerade ball, where guests get decked out as Addams Family characters, takes place on October 10 at the James Ward Mansion.
Photo: Michael Paras
The festival’s inception came about seven years ago, when creator and chairperson Dawn Mackey, then in her first days as a Westfield councilwoman, took inspiration from BlobFest, an annual festival in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, where the 1958 movie The Blob was filmed. Westfield’s adaptation, a tribute to its most famous former resident, was a no-brainer, and plans for a month-long Addams celebration soon commenced.
Baked into the festival is an appreciation for the cartoonist’s upbringing in Westfield and his lasting impact on pop culture. In 1938, he created the Addams Family characters as a cartoonist for The New Yorker, which famously spawned several movies and TV shows over the years, including the current hit Wednesday.
An interesting piece of Addams’s early art can still be seen in town. As a teenager in the 1920s, Addams graffitied a skeleton in pencil and chalk on the wall of a barn near his house. Dudley the skeleton stayed hidden for nearly a century before seeing the light, when the relic was removed from the barn in 2018 and put on display by the town.
Westfield is also home to what many have dubbed the Addams Family House, a 19th-century home on Elm Street that Addams regularly passed while walking to high school. The house’s Gothic Revival architecture helped inspire the cartoon family’s home.
The Elm Street home that inspired the Addams Family house. Photo: Michael Paras
Beyond the Addams Family, the cartoonist was an accomplished artist. The festival attempts to ensure that Addams’s vast body of work is not forgotten and to capture his essence. “He’s a fascinating man,” Mackey says. He was indeed “dark and broody,” as one might imagine, but he also had “a fantastic sense of humor. He was the life of the party. He just was sort of like a source of light and joy.”
Not just a grand tribute to Addams and a celebration of art, Mackey says the festival’s most important trait is that it’s uniquely Westfield and something no other place in the world can claim.
“I like to say that AddamsFest is by the community and for the community,” Mackey says of the event. “This is cultivated. It’s curated. It’s homegrown. That’s what makes it really special.”
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