On October 31st

On October 31, 1945 — Halloween — the last residents left Topaz and the Utah desert camp shut down. More than 11,000 Japanese Americans had passed through its dust storms and barbed wire; today the gridded foundations on the alkali flat and the Topaz Museum in Delta mark what the government called a 'relocation center' and survivors called a prison.

For Halloween 2025, Yreka's historic Evergreen Cemetery — burial ground of pioneers, vigilantes and the town's founding families since the 1850s — advertised a historical ghost-story tour, part of a regional tradition of October cemetery walks that treats the graveyard as open-air archive. The cemetery holds some of the oldest marked graves in far-northern California.