Things to Do in Forest Park This Fall: Concerts & Casket Races

Forest Park has about 14,000 living residents packed into roughly a square and a half mile of land. Somewhere between five and ten times that many people are buried within the same square mile and a half, spread across Forest Home, Concordia, Woodlawn, Waldheim, Jewish Waldheim, and Altenheim. That ratio is not a spooky trivia fact the village trots out for Halloween marketing. It is the actual organizing logic behind how this town spends its fall.

The cemeteries here are not backdrops. They are venues. A neighborhood porch-concert series now books shows inside a mausoleum. A chamber of commerce built its signature annual event around a coffin-shaped go-kart race. If you live in Forest Park, you already sense that this place treats its landmarks as usable civic space rather than scenery. What might surprise you is how deliberate that choice has been, and how much of it converges on one single stretch of real estate: Beloit Avenue and the grounds of Forest Home Cemetery.

The Concert Series That Moved Into the Mausoleum

The Forest Park Arts Alliance started its Stoop Sessions back in 2019 as exactly what the name suggests: local musicians performing on the front porches of Forest Park homeowners, with neighbors pulling up lawn chairs on the grass. The Forest Park Review reported that one Arts Alliance member once described the whole concept as a small Ravinia. For years, that was the extent of it: someone's stoop, a folding chair, a bucket passed around for donations.

This year the series expanded onto ground with a very different history. On August 1, 2026, the Historical Society of Forest Park partnered with the Arts Alliance to host its first Stoop Session at the Lehmann Mausoleum inside Forest Home Cemetery, with music from Bloody Tambourine and the Musical Mafia. The setup mirrored the porch version almost exactly: doors at 6:30, music at 7, a Smokey Joel hot dog, bring your own chair or blanket. The only real difference was the address. The Kiwanis Club of Forest Park sponsored the evening, and organizers noted parking is limited near the cemetery, so the recommendation was to walk or bike if you can, with a quarter-mile walk from the lot to the stoop itself once you arrive.

The series returned to the same grounds on September 20, 2026, just this past weekend, continuing a run that has now stretched from a summer novelty into a recurring piece of the fall calendar. That the format survived the move from a stranger's front lawn to a mausoleum courtyard, and that people kept showing up for both, tells you something about how residents here relate to the cemeteries. They are not treated as separate from daily life. They are folded into it.

Why the Chamber Bet on a Coffin Race

The event most people associate with Forest Park's cemetery identity did not start at a cemetery at all. Back in 2012, chamber executive director Laurie Kokenes was planning the Forest Park Chamber of Commerce's 100th anniversary. The race debuted as part of that anniversary, with inspiration from coffin races held in Manitou Springs, Colorado, tied to a local ghost story.

The idea's local appeal is easy to sum up:

"That's so Forest Park."

The chamber has run some version of the race every fall since. It was not the only idea tried in those early years. A masquerade ball, a Zombie Pub Crawl, and an event called Ghoulin' in the Grove all came and went. What survived was the race and the trick-or-treat that follows it on Madison Street, because those were the two things people actually wanted to keep doing.

This October marks the annual Forest Park Casket Races, and the rules have stayed simple by design. Each casket needs four handles, four wheels, no steering mechanism, and a seat for the rider. Five teammates compete per entry: four runners pushing, one costumed "ghost" riding inside wearing a helmet. Every team runs the 585-foot course on Beloit Avenue twice to post a qualifying time, and the four fastest advance to a final heat where first, second, and third place get decided in a matter of seconds. There is also a trophy for the team that finishes dead last, which by most accounts is the one people actually want.

Race Day, Mapped Out

The chamber's 2026 schedule keeps the whole event inside a tight window, which is useful to know if you are planning your Saturday around it.

Spectating is free. Racing costs $40 per team, and the chamber does not accept race-day sign-ups, so anyone thinking about building a casket for next year should register well ahead of time. The race takes place on Beloit Avenue between Madison and Adams, and the day flows directly into trick-or-treat a few blocks over on Madison, which is the reason almost nobody leaves the moment the trophies are handed out.

Where the Crowd Goes After

Madison Street does the rest of the work once the last heat finishes. FatDuck Tavern & Grill, at the corner of Elgin and Madison, is known for the duck-fat fries that give the place its name, and the DuckFat Burger, topped with brie, applewood bacon, and caramelized onion, is the move if you have been standing outside on a cold October morning. A few doors down, O'Sullivan's Public House occupies a converted 1890s roadhouse, and the original copper ceiling and terrazzo floor are still intact, which makes it as much a stop for the building as for the beer list. If the day calls for something sweeter, Brown Cow Ice Cream Parlor is the traditional finish, handcrafting waffle cones and pulling fresh-baked pies and cookies out for anyone still hungry after a morning of hot dogs and race-day snacks.

The Rest of Autumn on Madison Street

The cemetery-adjacent events are the headline, but they are not the whole season. The chamber's fall Wine Walk turns Madison Street into a self-guided tasting route through the same shops and restaurants that anchor the rest of the year, and the Arts Alliance's Garage Galleries show, which draws over 100 juried local artists across more than 40 garage galleries throughout the village, has become one of the larger community art events on the calendar, pulling in more than 800 attendees in recent years.

Live music does not slow down once the summer patio season ends. Robert's Westside continues to book national and regional touring acts through the fall, including Shinyribs on September 24, while Scratch Public House keeps its acoustic sets running most weekends. For a lower-key night, Circle Bowling Lanes offers the kind of retro, no-frills evening that has nothing to do with Halloween and everything to do with why people who already live here tend to stay in on a Tuesday rather than drive somewhere else.

None of this is programmed as a tourist draw. It is programmed as what the town does with itself in October, using the same buildings, the same street, and in the case of the Stoop Sessions, the same cemetery grounds that define the place the rest of the year. That is the part that is easy to miss if you are only skimming an events calendar. Forest Park does not treat its cemeteries as a fact to work around. It treats them as some of the best real estate it has for bringing people together, which says more about how this village operates than any single festival could on its own.

If you are already living here, you likely know most of these spots by name. If you are weighing whether Forest Park is the kind of place where a town's oddest civic fact becomes one of its best assets, this fall calendar is a fairly honest answer.

For more on what makes this village and the surrounding western suburbs worth paying attention to, Ed Bellock keeps a close eye on the neighborhoods he works in, on and off the market calendar. Get in touch anytime you want a local read on where things stand.