Great Falls — Brayleigh Miller, 5, grasped her father’s hand as she stepped into the ominous structure on the Great Falls Village Green. As they walked into a dimly lit makeshift hallway, she heard scraping sounds and started to pull back toward the entrance, but her dad held her hand firm and kept moving forward.

“He told me that it would be fine, we just go one step at a time and we’d be done before I knew it,” Miller said. “As long as he was in front of me, I figured he could stop anything coming at us.”

Miller ended up making it the entire way through, and her reward at the end of the Great Falls Friends and Neighbors Haunted House was a handful of candy for her collection.

The haunted house was just one part of the annual Great Falls Halloween Spooktacular Thursday, Oct. 31. Children, pets and adults from around the area came to the village green to trick or treat at local businesses.

“Great Falls isn’t what I would call a trick-or-treating friendly community. Our penchant for low density makes for long walks and not too many stops if we were to stay in our neighborhood, so I’m glad we can all come here,” said Susan Blakely of Great Falls. “Here they can hit twice as many stops in 20 minutes than they could all night, and we’re not too worried about traffic or darkness.”

The Langley High School band provided the soundtrack for the evening, as costumed musicians set up in the parking lot and played throughout the evening.

Captain America and other Marvel superheroes such as Iron Man seemed to be the most popular costumes of the day, but children also came dressed as a variety of animals, athletes and in at least one case, furniture.

“The best costume I saw was a young lady dressed as a dining room table, complete with cups, plates and her head came up through the middle of the table and she was wearing a birthday cake hat,” Becky Redoubt of Great Falls said. “Very creative, and bonus points for being something that was clearly not bought in a bag at a costume store.”