The Halloween Hoot did not start as a village program. According to longtime organizer Janice Hausman, it began with a handful of women in one subdivision who decided their kids needed a safer place to trick-or-treat than the streets around Beverly Park. Somewhere along the way, the village's own Parks and Recreation board took the event over, though the informal, neighbor-run character never quite left it. By 2022, organizers were calling it the 26th annual Hoot. By that count, this October's edition lands somewhere around the 30th, which means the same trail through the same woods has been drawing costumed kids and flashlights for roughly three decades.
That kind of continuity is not an accident in Beverly Hills. It is the way the village works, because the village never built the thing most suburbs default to when they want a shared calendar: a commercial Main Street. There is no cluster of storefronts serving as the obvious backdrop for a fall festival or a concert series. Instead, nearly everything that counts as community life here runs through one place, a park just over 30 acres tucked off Beverly Road, and largely through one organization, a Lions Club chartered in 1972 that still counts more than 30 members. If you want to understand how this village actually spends its autumns, you do not need to track a dozen separate institutions. You need to know this one park and this one club, because they are doing most of the work.
The park is doing more than you think
Residents who drive past Beverly Park on the way to somewhere else tend to picture it as a sledding hill with a playground attached. That undersells it. The grounds include a disc golf course along the south end, a set of fitness stations near the sled hill, and an outdoor ping pong table, an amenity that shows up in surprisingly few Oakland County parks of similar size. A nature trail connects the park's south side to its north side, threading past benches and small educational stations before opening onto a modern playscape, a large rental pavilion, and indoor restrooms. Near the playground sits a free library box, the kind where a kid can trade one paperback for another on the way home.
None of this is dressed up for visitors. It reads as infrastructure built for a village that expects to use its one park constantly, not occasionally. And the fall calendar backs that up. Nearly every named event on the village's own events page happens at this address: 18801 Beverly Road.
The Lions Club shows up at almost everything
Pull apart the individual events on that calendar and a pattern emerges fast. The Beverly Hills Lions Club sponsors Java & Jazz, the free coffee and live music series that runs the third Sunday of the month from May through September at the park pavilion. The same club sponsors the Halloween Hoot. It organizes the Memorial Day Fun Run and Walk, a 5K and 4K that starts and ends at Beverly School with proceeds staying inside the village. It runs the annual park clean up. Its members show up twice a year for Michigan's Adopt-a-Road program.
This is not a coincidence of scheduling. It is a small village running its social calendar through a small number of hands, which means the same roughly 30 volunteers who hand you a cup of coffee at Java & Jazz in July are plausibly the same people staffing a treat station in October. For a resident trying to get involved, this cuts the learning curve considerably. Find the Lions Club and you have found the connective tissue behind most of what happens here.
What is actually left on the 2026 calendar
By early September, most of Beverly Hills' summer programming has already wrapped. Food Truck Mondays ran from early May through the end of August. The Concerts in the Park series, which brought Harmonized Steel, Northgate Drive, Cliff Erikson, and The Hood to the pavilion stage on Friday nights in June through August, has also closed out for the season. The one remaining outdoor movie night at dusk was scheduled for August 20.
What is still ahead, as of this writing, is a short but specific list:
| Event | Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Java & Jazz (final date of the season) | Sunday, September 20, 2026 | 9:00 a.m. to noon | Beverly Park pavilion |
| Halloween Hoot | Saturday, October 24, 2026 | 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. | Beverly Park, Beverly Road entrance |
Java & Jazz closes out with the same format it has run all summer: free coffee, live music from the Ryan Bills Trio, and no admission charge. It is a low-key way to catch the last of the pavilion's warm-weather use before the calendar turns toward Halloween programming.
The Hoot is the bigger draw. Kids in costume walk a wooded trail lined with decorated stations, each one run by a different neighborhood group or local business, some sticking with the same theme year after year and others reinventing it annually. Adults are required to accompany children, and a flashlight is worth bringing since the trail runs at dusk into full dark. The event is free, funded by sponsors rather than a village budget line, and organizers ask that attendees use the Beverly Road entrance specifically, since that is where the trail begins.
Where the evening usually ends
For families who want dinner before or after either event, a short drive away on Southfield Road sits one of the village's longest-running dining rooms. Beverly Hills Grill has operated for more than 30 years, and current owner Raphael Michael took over the restaurant in October 2022 with a specific promise to founder Bill Roberts that he would not gut the menu or the staff. He kept that promise, and the one meaningful change he made was restoring full brunch service, which had paused during the pandemic. Brunch now runs Tuesday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., with dinner service Tuesday through Saturday from 3 to 10 p.m.
It is the kind of place that shows up in conversation less because it is trying to be discovered and more because it has simply been there the whole time, serving the same families who show up to Java & Jazz and the Hoot.
Why the smallness is the point
None of this reads as a lack of infrastructure. It reads as a village that decided, deliberately or not, that one well-used park and one long-running civic club could carry the weight that a commercial district carries elsewhere. The tradeoff is that Beverly Hills does not offer much variety in where its community life happens. The upside is that showing up once, at any one of these events, tends to be enough to recognize the same faces at the next one.
That is a small, specific kind of continuity, and it is the reason a Halloween trail that started with a few neighborhood moms is still running three decades later in exactly the same woods.
If you are curious about what makes a specific street or subdivision in Beverly Hills tick, or you are weighing a move into the village and want a read on daily life beyond the listing photos, Kathy Remski has spent years working this corridor of Oakland County and is always glad to talk through what a neighborhood actually feels like to live in. Let's Connect.
