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Guide · September 5, 2026

Spooktacular: how the city's Halloween night works

Rancho Cucamonga's annual trunk-or-treat night at the RC Sports Center — what's free, what the $10 wristband buys, when it runs, and how to get a trunk in.

Covered outdoor courts at RC Sports Center with people playing pickleball under basketball hoops
© Foothill & Vine

Every October the City of Rancho Cucamonga throws a Halloween night at its indoor sports gym on Rochester Avenue. That's Spooktacular: a free trunk-or-treat, a paid Fun Zone, crafts and a silent disco, all at the RC Sports Center. This is the guide to how it works in any year. For this year's date and hours, the 2026 listing is the page to bookmark.

What it is

Spooktacular is the city's own Halloween event — run by the City of Rancho Cucamonga, held at a city building, and billed on the city's event page as annual.

The core of it is a trunk-or-treat. The city puts out a Call for Trunks, people and groups apply to run one, and families come in costume and collect candy from the trunks. That part is free.

Around it sits the Fun Zone, with games and activities the city pitches for all ages. Getting in costs $10 for a wristband, and the same wristband covers the crafts and the silent disco. So the budget is either zero dollars or ten per wristband, and the candy is the same either way.

When it happens

Here's the pattern, from the three years we could confirm with sources we could load:

  • 2023: Saturday, October 21, 3pm to 6pm.
  • 2025: Saturday, October 25, 3pm to 6pm.
  • 2026: Saturday, October 24, 5pm to 8pm.

So: a Saturday in the back half of October, six to ten days ahead of Halloween, three hours long. The city calls it annual and nothing we found says otherwise, but we couldn't load a source that confirms 2024, so we're giving you the years we can stand behind rather than the ones we assume.

Note the hours. In 2023 and 2025 it was an afternoon event. In 2026 it moved two hours later, into the evening. Don't carry last year's start time in your head. Check the city's event page or our calendar in the weeks before, and if you only want the free stuff, that view exists too.

Where it is

The RC Sports Center, 8303 Rochester Ave, in Central RC. Two things about the building are worth knowing before you plug it into your phone.

First, the name. It used to be the Family Sports Center, and plenty of maps, flyers and grandparents still call it that. Same building.

Second, its normal schedule. On an ordinary week the center does indoor basketball, volleyball and pickleball, Monday through Friday from 3pm to 8pm and Sunday from 1pm to 5pm, and it's closed Saturdays. Spooktacular is on a Saturday. That's the exception, not the rule, so don't read the Saturday closure on the regular listing as a cancellation.

If you know the Epicenter, you know the street: Morongo Field at The Epicenter, where the Quakes play, is at 8408 Rochester Ave, just down the road.

What's free and what the wristband buys

Free, no wristband needed: the trunk-or-treat and the candy that comes with it.

The $10 wristband: the Fun Zone's games and activities, the crafts, and the silent disco.

In 2026 the city sold wristbands ahead of time at two places:

  • The RC Sports Center itself, 8303 Rochester Ave, Monday through Friday from 3pm to 8pm — which lines up with the building's regular hours.
  • Central Park, 11200 Base Line Rd, Monday through Friday from 8am to 8pm and Saturday from 8am to 5pm. The city page names the park, not a specific building. Central Park is the hundred-acre civic park that also holds the senior center and the Goldy S. Lewis Community Center.

Those sale locations and hours come from the 2026 page. Treat them as the likely pattern, not a promise, and confirm before you drive over for one.

Want to run a trunk?

The trunks don't appear on their own. The city opens a Call for Trunks application on the event page for people and groups who want to take part in the trunk-or-treat. The 2026 page also lists sponsors in two tiers, a Monster Mash Sponsor and an Event Supporter Sponsor, so a sponsorship route exists as well. The details for both live on the city's page, not ours.

Who shows up

We haven't counted the crowd, and we won't guess at it. What we can tell you is who else has been on the ground. In 2025 a San Bernardino County sheriff's lieutenant posted from the event that the Rancho PD team and its K-9, Boots, were there, with thanks to the fire department, Public Works and Animal Services as partners. And in 2023 the county's Second District supervisor's office carried Spooktacular on its own calendar. That's one year's snapshot and one calendar entry, but it gives you the flavor: the agencies that serve the city tend to show up in person.

Parking

Our parking page has one rule for most of the city — free surface lots — and the Sports Center listing notes on-site parking. What we don't have is any measure of how that lot handles an event-night crowd, so we're not going to invent one. If you've been and know how it went, tell us and we'll add it.

The rest of Halloween in RC this year

Spooktacular is the family night. Around it on the 2026 calendar:

  • Family Camp Out — Saturday, October 10 into Sunday morning at Heritage Community Park, run by the city. Registration is required, and the city hadn't published a price when we checked.
  • Nevermore: a Poe murder mystery dinner — October 12 and October 26 at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Adults only, 18 and over, $85 or $100 for the VIP tier. The opposite end of the spectrum from a trunk-or-treat.
  • Senior V.I.P. pumpkin patch party — Tuesday, October 27, 9am at the James L. Brulte Senior Center, for adults 50 and older. Free, registration required.

Next year those dates will be different and this list will be stale. The calendar won't be.

Make a day of it

Central Park is in the same neighborhood and is the obvious afternoon before: lawns to run on, a free outdoor fitness court, and The Bark dog park if the dog needs a run first. For a full plan, our kids' itinerary and the ranked best things to do with kids cover the rest of the day, and the free list covers the budget version. The family hub has everything else.

What we don't cover

  • Crowd sizes, wait times, or how much candy to expect. Nobody publishes it, and we won't make it up.
  • Whether 2024 ran as usual. The city calls the event annual; we just couldn't load a page that confirms that particular year.
  • A 2023 city news page about trunk-or-treat stations that we were pointed to returns an access-denied error now, so nothing here leans on it.
  • Dinner nearby. We haven't scouted Rochester Avenue for an event-night meal. The places to eat with kids list is the city-wide answer in the meantime.

Sources