Aurora Theatre brings ghost tours, a haunted pub crawl and cemetery tours to downtown Lawrenceville through Nov. 1

On some nights this month, the group out of the Lawrenceville Arts Center doesn't head for its cars. It walks. Led by storytellers, it steps off from 128 East Pike Street into the dark toward the square — and some nights past it, a half-mile or so, to a field of headstones where Gwinnett County's founders are buried.

Aurora Theatre, the resident company at the Lawrenceville Arts Center, is running four ticketed Halloween experiences it calls "Haunted Happenings" through November 1, 2026. It is a season, not a single weekend: ghost tours began September 18, the Brews & Boos Haunted Pub Crawl on September 19, and the Haunted Cemetery Tours on September 26, and all three — plus private bookings of any of them — run through November 1.

The set is the town itself

What these nights walk people through is Lawrenceville's actual past, not a stage set. The city was incorporated December 15, 1821, and has been Gwinnett's county seat for more than two centuries; the Romanesque courthouse anchoring the square replaced the original 1824 building after a fire in 1871. The ghost tours make the Old City Jail a longstanding featured stop, their storytellers weaving local legends and reported paranormal encounters around those actual places.

The Haunted Cemetery Tours put people inside the Historic Lawrenceville Cemetery itself — about a half-mile from the square between East Pike Street and Highway 29 — standing at the graves of Gwinnett County founders William Maltbie and Elisha Winn and Lawrenceville's first mayor, John Clay Smith. The same ground holds Revolutionary War veteran Nathan Spence, who lived from 1743 to 1833, at least eight Confederate soldiers, and numerous unmarked graves believed to belong to formerly enslaved African Americans whose identities have not been established.

Even the home venue is repurposed history: the Lawrenceville Arts Center was built from a century-old former church through a public-private partnership, a $7.5 million theater complex that opened in May 2007.

A drink with the history

The Brews & Boos Haunted Pub Crawl threads the town's history and its nightlife into one walk — a 21-and-over haunted-history tour around Lawrenceville Square with stops at working bars, including Truck & Tap and McCray's Tavern. At each stop, ghost stories, games, and bawdy songs arrive alongside the drinks, so the history and the nightlife share the same sidewalk. The $40 ticket is all-inclusive.

What the night leaves behind

The money these nights put on the street lands where the walk itself goes. Ghost tickets run $20 for adults and $15 for children, the cemetery tour $25, all at the Arts Center box office. The all-inclusive pub crawl buys its drinks at Truck & Tap and McCray's Tavern. The cemetery walk runs about 90 minutes and 1.5 miles — ages 13 and up, closed-toe shoes, a flashlight and a signed release required — and each public tour is capped at 25 people.

A 2014 economic-impact study put Aurora Theatre's contribution to historic downtown Lawrenceville at about $3.24 million — a figure older than this season, but a sense of the scale the theater brings to the square.

All three tours begin and end at the Lawrenceville Arts Center, 128 East Pike Street, and run through November 1, 2026; tickets are available through Aurora Theatre. And in the cemetery, the groups stop not only at the graves of Gwinnett's founders but at others whose identities have not been established.