Hi friends of the Zombie Bike Parade Festival,
WE DID IT!! On Halloween day, Davis turned into a Halloween Wonderland, and YOU were part of it 😎! Huge thank you to our festival hosts, the Davis Odd Fellows, The Bike Campaign and Davis Bike Club, and to our "powered by" sponsors, City of Davis, Visit Yolo, Action Flipbooks, and Dump Dawgz Hauling! Not to mention our endless sponsors, partners, media friends and in-kind contributors. And haunted blessings to our dead-icated volunteers! You are ALL 👁️ seen!
To Aaron Wedra, Zombie Festival Director: thank you. To Michelle Weiss and Milly Wedra, our festival chair and vice-chair: thank you! And one more elevated 👻 shout-out to Maureen Casaus. It goes without saying that without you, and so many others, this festival would not be possible.
Now, picture it. Around 350 Halloween creatures of all sorts rolling out of Community Park on bikes at 11am. We had a wave of zombies, witches, dinosaurs 🧟♂️🧙🦖 and at least one very committed hot dog 🌭 heading out to Mace Ranch Park where BMX riders flew through the air. Back at Community Park, about 50 vendors, entertainers, musicians, and community groups filled the lawn: a Halloween train, bounce houses, skaters jamming on the brand-new skate park, live bats, an Angry Birds launching station, the Davis Arts Center hosting spooky surprises, and a costume contest handing out $1,000 in gift cards.
Things started out slow and spooky at Community Park, but the Halloween spirit grew through the afternoon. Then all the bicyclists returned from Mace Ranch Park, cheered on by a rally band, and BOOM, the festival was on like Donkey Kong 🐒 with martial arts demos, zombie video games, the Zombie Kingdom Quest, and endless community building opportunities 🥋🎨🏰. Then at 2:30, when we were really vibing, the SkyDance SkyDiving zombies dropped out of the sky (5 of them this time!) and landed right in the middle of the festival grounds! 🪂
After our most magical moment, our emcee directed our zombie horde downtown for the Trick-or-Treat Trail, where we coordinated with the Davis Downtown Business Association, local businesses and the UC Davis Marching Band to keep the Halloween festivities going from 3 to 5pm. Thank you to Brett Lee and the DDBA team for working with us to get the timing just right for joining our events!
From our Monster Run at 8am, through the skydivers at 2:30, to the end of our festival at 3pm, nearly 2,500 people came through Community Park and Mace Ranch Park.
Counting downtown festivities 🍕🥁🍬, Halloween day in Davis served an estimated 5,000+ people. The 8th Annual Zombie Bike Parade Festival was the biggest one we have ever thrown.
And here is what you made possible. Together we raised more than $33,000, and every dollar of it was a win. It put on a completely FREE festival for the whole community. It put the Zombie Bike Parade Festival brand in front of the region more than a million times. And it is sending about $11,000 to NorCal Trykers, the biggest gift in our history. That means about seven more kids with disabilities get a custom tryke built just for them, and feel the wind in their hair for the very first time. Over eight years, this festival has now given more than $60,000 and put roughly 49 kids on trykes.
Another $300 went to Thriving Pink thanks to our partnership with Bohème Bewitched.
We are officially a regional brand. This year we were on every major station in Sacramento: Good Day Sacramento, CBS13, FOX40 and ABC10, with live coverage, and KCRA came out on festival day itself. This was by far the most TV coverage we've ever had. The Davis Enterprise gave us four pages, plus 3,000 extra guides handed out by businesses all over town. The Davis Dirt gave us four pages too, plus extensive digital coverage. Between TV, the papers, magazines like Davis Living and Consumers Guide, fifteen social channels, six newsletters, lawn signs across town and two large downtown banners, the festival made more than one million impressions this fall. The website welcomed 11,000 visitors, two and a half times last year. Our marketing is half the journey, and festival day is the other half. If your logo was with us, it traveled a long, long way.
Davis even got its own video game 🎮 this year. ZOMBIFY DAVIS (zombifydavis.com) put more than 600 real locals into a pixel-art Halloween adventure through the real town of Davis. Don't take our word for it. Play it. YOU are probably in the game. It's so meta!
Thank you again for showing up, and for using zombies as the confetti to bring attention to a community that really does care. We had seventy volunteer shifts, and every single one got filled. We had more than 200 sponsors, partners and media friends. Firefighters, a bank, a brewery, a cemetery district, a coffin maker, a dance company, two county supervisors, more than one judge, and so many more community groups, organizations and businesses all put their mark on this event. Neighbors in Mace Ranch invited their whole neighborhood to the park. That is the magic, and it only happens when people say YES.
WE DID IT!
From the bottom of our Zombie Festival Committee members' undead hearts, thank you!
Yet we want to ask one more small favor: if you loved the festival and our Halloween shenanigans, say so where it counts. A Google review takes two minutes and helps pave the way to bigger sponsors and more partners for 2027: leave us a Google review.
More than 900 festival photos are on their way to this website in the next couple of days. In the meantime, catch the fun on our Facebook and Instagram.
For the last time this year.... zombie hugs 🧟
The Zombie Bike Parade Festival Committee
