MATTAPOISETT — The Mattapoisett Museum hosted a day of Halloween fun for the whole family on Saturday, Oct. 30 including a scavenger hunt, tarot card readings, and spooky stories acted out by ORR High School drama volunteers.

Jessica DeCicco-Carey, who helped organize the event, said that it was the first time the museum has done a Halloween event, other than a few Halloween dances held right after the carriage house was built.

“It’s just not something they ever thought to do, which I think is weird because it's a great place for Halloween things,” she said. “They didn’t even hand out candy.”

So when a museum volunteer brought up the idea over the summer, DeCicco-Carey ran with it.

“It was kind of a group effort,” she said.

One of the highlights of the event were the local scary stories which were adapted into skits by museum volunteer and ORR drama club alumnus Luke Couto.

Couto said when DeCicco-Carey approached him with the idea, he loved it and immediately went looking for local scary stories that he could make into short one-act plays.

In one such story dating from about the turn of the century, a Mattapoisett woman named Annie Paine is grief stricken when her young daughter passes away. But the poor woman can’t let her daughter go and instead keeps her remains on display in her living room until neighbors notice and the board of health has to confiscate the girl’s body.

In another, a Mattapoisett native named Joshua Cushing is captured by Nigerian pirates while sailing off the coast of Africa. But Cushing and his crew are able to outsmart the pirates, tricking them into jumping off the ship under the guise of teaching them a new fishing technique.

Cushing even manages to take one of the pirates’ daggers as a trophy to his quick thinking. The skit reaches a crescendo as the actors bring out the real dagger which the museum has in its collection.

“It’s really the perfect story,” said Couto. “It happened on Halloween and it’s relevant to the town.”