TOLEDO, Ohio — Organizers for the annual Adams Street Zombie Crawl announced Thursday that they will not be holding the event in 2024.
The Village on Adams said in a social media post that they plan to take the year off to redesign and fundraise to hold the event next year.
"After the year off during COVID in 2020, we came back very strong in '21 and had our best ZC ever. However, in '22 and '23, security and infrastructure costs soared to unsustainable heights, and the perception by the Zombies of all that additional, unnecessary security was that it wasn't very appealing, and attendance dropped both years."
Organizers said last year was the first attempt at presale tickets and many who purchased presale tickets didn't get into the event. The Village on Adams said they were asked by the Toledo Police Department and the city of Toledo to put a "curfew" on the event and stop admission at 11 p.m.
According to the organization, they also had reduced gates for last year's event which caused a "bottleneck of zombies" waiting to get in. The increased security at the Zombie Crawl included medal detectors, over 50 uniformed officers and over 100 security personnel in total, organizers said.
"We, the Villagers, shoulder the blame for not adapting to this new landscape and our new security environment quickly and getting everyone who wanted to participate into the event," the Village on Adams said in the social media post.
Organizers said they plan to host the event in October 2025.