Every good Halloween story needs an origin, and this one is unusually well documented for something that started with two people talking. "It just occurred to me that zombies are popular, Halloween is coming up and people love bikes," Dave Rosenberg told the Davis Enterprise in 2019. "It all just clicked."
The blueprint
Rosenberg and his wife Lea are credited on the festival's own site with crafting the blueprint: a completely free community Halloween celebration that raises money for NorCal Trykers. Both remain longtime major sponsors of the event they dreamed up. Aaron Wedra, the festival's director, has said of them: "our deepest gratitude to Dave and Lea for their brilliant minds, and their even bigger hearts."
The idea did not appear from nowhere. Rosenberg had been the spokesman for a 2011 attempt by Davis to set a Guinness World Record for the longest single line of bicycles, an effort that grew out of the Davis Odd Fellows' "World's Greatest Bicycle Parade," run from the Lodge in 2010 and 2011. The October 3, 2010 ride actually set the record, with 916 riders. So when the Lodge started kicking around a zombie-themed version a few years later, hoping to set a new Guinness category, they were building on ground they had already broken.
Guinness said no. Davis said brains.
Guinness declined to create a category for a zombie bike parade. It could have ended the idea right there. Instead, in Wedra's words, "by the time they said 'no,' we had so much community support that we never lost enthusiasm for a second." Around the same time, physical therapist Gill Williams had pitched the Odd Fellows Lodge on funding Amtryke adaptive tricycles through her new nonprofit, NorCal Trykers. The Lodge folded the two ideas together, and a fundraiser was born where a world record attempt had failed.
The Lodge enlisted one of its own members to chair it: Aaron Wedra, at the time a Davis Enterprise ad rep and graphic designer at Smartz Graphics, a Chamber ambassador and self-described fan of The Walking Dead. "I was dying to do it," he told the Enterprise. He has chaired or directed the event every year since, and still designs the website today.
"I was dying to do it." (Aaron Wedra, on being asked to chair the first ride)
Two hundred fifty riders, and a wish for five hundred
The first Zombie Bike Parade happened on Sunday, October 20, 2019, at Central Park: registration at 10 am, the parade itself at 11:30, a roughly 2.5-mile route onto the UC Davis campus, through downtown and back. It was the only year the event ever charged admission, $5 to register. The rules were simple: look zombie-like, ride from start to finish, and say "brains" at both ends of the route. Organizers hoped for 500 riders. About 250 showed up, which by any normal standard is a fantastic first year and, by this festival's later standards, was just the beginning.
Central Park that day had food trucks, live DJs, a green screen photo booth run by Action Flipbooks, the Square Tomatoes / Davis Craft and Vintage Fair, Jump Bikes rentals, and a "Thriller" flash mob from Mirror Image Dance Company. More than 35 sponsors backed that first year, including the Davis Cemetery & Arboretum, Davis Professional Firefighters Local 3494, Ink Monkey, Smartz Graphics, Yolo County Supervisor Jim Provenza and the Davis Food Co-op.
Founders and Transmissions
The founding committee, as named on the festival's own site, reads like a small-town honor roll: Sheila Allen, Jenny Decker, Matthew Elliot, Scott Schiller, David Siegel, Kevin Sitz, Nancy Schrott, Dave Reed, Timothy, Diana and Zoe Wilkinson, Dave Zavatson, Terryl Kocsis, Maria Contreras Tebbutt, Erik Vink, Alice Stewart, Dawn Student and Jim Walker. Timothy Wilkinson wrote a series of tongue-in-cheek teaser posts that September and October called "Transmission #1" through "#4," warning of strange events and zombie sightings near the Davis Food Co-op, and shot many of the earliest photos himself.
The two host organizations were set from the start: Davis Odd Fellows Lodge #169, chartered in 1870 and the oldest continuously operating organization in Davis, and The Bike Campaign, founded in 2011 by Maria Contreras Tebbutt. Davis Bike Club joined as a third host by 2024. Learn more about all three on the team page.
From a parade to a whole comic book
The event grew fast and unevenly: about 250 riders in 2019, roughly 1,000 in the pandemic-era open-loop 2020 ride, more than 2,000 in 2021, a peak of about 3,500 in 2022, then somewhat smaller turnouts from 2023 through 2025 due to wind and rain. By 2025 the festival counted close to 200 partners and was voted 4th Best Event in Yolo County in the Davis Enterprise's Readers' Choice awards.
On September 15, 2025, the festival published a two-page origin comic by Davis illustrator Elijah Adorno (elijahadorno.com, @sleepy_emryl on Instagram), turning six years of email threads and Enterprise clippings into something a kid could actually read. It is a fitting way to tell this story: started as a serious idea about mobility and community, told, in the end, with a wink.
Want to be part of the next chapter? Volunteer, sponsor, or just show up on the day. See how the story keeps unfolding on the history page.
