A monster now, the Halloween Loop was created as a grand experiment.

When you’ve paid your cover to Gumby and squeezed into a bar even more crowded than the bus you just got off, and you’ve pushed your way past Dracula, Frankenstein and Two-People/One Cow, and checked the circus clowns playing instruments on stage, and ordered a beer from Elvis, you can’t help but wonder whether it’s true what they say about Green M & M’s, because the one you’re now elbow-to-elbow with is kinda cute. Or you think she might be.

This scene doesn’t happen anywhere but at the Halloween Loop, a wonderfully strange Wilmington tradition in which everyone is in costume except for the city—which, for one night, at least, is revealed in all its wild glory. Not often does Wilmington forget it’s supposed to be a buttondown-collar kind of town. Which is why, some 25 years ago, the Loop got started in the first place.

The Loop, say its creators, grew up around a need to remind Wilmingtonians of that genuine-but-rarely-seen spirit of their city. It only came out at night. And it needed music and people to encourage it. Most importantly, it needed a small group of creative young entrepreneurs either foolish or audacious enough to believe it existed.

There was Dale Melton, a musician and self-styled publisher, who in an attempt to promote local bands published a monthly entertainment magazine called Fine Times. His group included contributors such as Bob Bowersox, a young restaurateur/writer/radio personality; Michael Stack, a local artist; and a cultural affairs director for the city, Donna Marie King, who made sure that her duties would include promoting events that her peers would enjoy.

Wilmington in 1979, they say, had a happening music scene. Bands such as Robert Hazzard, the A’s, and the Hooters were making noise in Philadelphia; in Delaware, Jack of Diamonds, the Sin City Band, the Watson Brothers, the Bluerocks and Tom Larsen were creating a buzz of their own.

In an attempt to showcase the Delaware sound, Fine Times had hosted occasional events it called the Outdoor Cabaret, which put multiple acts in an outdoor setting. The events were a great success and the Fine Times staff knew they were onto something. The idea made sense for everyone involved: The clubs needed the ink; the magazine needed the club’s support in the form of ad revenue; and the bands needed a champion.

“We held a couple of meetings and talked about working collectively with the clubs on an event,” King recalls. “We referred to it at the time as ‘organized barhopping.’”

Brainstorming—in sessions that usually included more than a few cocktails in Melton’s bedroom—the group devised a scheme in which clubs would be connected by a shuttle bus, bars would pitch in for a promotional ad, and bands would be everywhere. In fact, the organizers required that participating bars feature original bands. “The thing that started the loop was the same thing that started ,” Bowersox says. “Wilmington was starting to rock and we were trying to get the word out.”

The story of how the name of the event originated is remembered: “At the first Outdoor Cabaret, we invited the restaurants and club people to come to the events and sell food, and we started having conversations with them about how we could increase traffic for them at their places,” King says. “We’d have these great debates on what to call it,” King says. “Everybody was coming up with elaborate, creative names, but I kept saying, ‘If this thing is successful, people are going to have a few drinks and not remember it in the morning. We have to call it something simple.’”

Bowersox recalls the name was inspired by a recent trip he’d taken to Chicago, where the lakefront promenade is known as the Loop. “I think it came from that,” he says. King used her connections in the city to secure a 1937 Mercedes open-air bus to cart around partiers, and, say her partners, encouraged city police “to look the other way” unless things got out of hand.

Stack created posters and Melton wrote about the event in Fine Times. Bowersox battened down the hatches in his Crepe Chalet restaurant, one of the Loop’s Market Street venues. Scheduled for the Friday night following Thanksgiving in 1979, the Loop was born. “And,” says Bowersox, “right from the get-go it was an outrageous success.”

After that, Loops were held monthly—always on the full moon—among the smattering of clubs along Market and Ninth streets where Wilmington’s nightlife was then centered. When Halloween 1980 rolled around, the Loop became a landmark event.

“The thing I remember most about that first Halloween Loop was its size. It was probably between 6,000 and 10,000 people on Market Street Mall, which was unheard of on a Friday night, and they were almost all in costume,” King says. “There were so many people that they couldn’t fit in the bars, and this whole sub-culture party started happening on the Mall. That was just a great thing.”

Since partiers had generally been attending Loop nights in groups, a tradition of group costumes quickly emerged. “You saw a lot of people who had obviously spent a lot of time creating their costumes,” King says. “There was the Andrews Sisters, who not only dressed as the Andrew Sisters but performed as them. I remember a group dressed as Hari Krishna people going up and down the mall burning incense and handing out old magazines.”

Bowersox says the Halloween Loop seemed to awaken in Wilmingtonians “a sense of freedom.”

“I’ve been to Mardi gras, and I have to say the Loop is the one thing it’s most similar to,” he says. “It was like Wilmington was New Orleans and the Market Street Mall was the French Quarter.”

One of the great ironies of the Halloween Loop is how it outlasted the very things it was intended to promote. By the sixth or seventh year, most of the original clubs were gone, nearly all the bands were broken up, and the city’s major entertainment corridor was moving west to Trolley Square. MBNA was soon to replace DuPont as the city’s major employer. Fine Times magazine was sold and summarily folded.

“The mayor changed, Delaware passed restrictive drinking laws as part of cracking down on drinking and driving, our groups started growing up and having families and moved away from the city, Market Street Mall collapsed commercially…All of it combined to sort of kill Fine Times,” Bowersox says.

“But the Loop lived.”