From “Hi Nana” to haunted halls: Why this Edison event hits close to home

I’ll be honest right up front: I’m not the biggest “paranormal, haunted, horrific, and grotesque” guy out there. I don’t spend my weekends hunting ghosts or collecting cursed artifacts. That said, I do find some of this stuff fascinating—and let’s face it, by the time we hit the end of February in New Jersey, cabin fever has climbed into the triple digits. So when I heard that Darkside After Dark is returning on Feb. 28, 2026, it definitely sparked my interest.

Darkside After Dark returns to Edison, NJ this February

Darkside After Dark takes over the New Jersey Convention and Expo Center in Edison from 3 to 10 p.m., offering a twilight dive into the weird, the strange, and the macabre. It’s New Jersey’s premier gathering for all things dark and unconventional, featuring live music and stage performances, live tattooing and piercing, eerie roaming entertainers, charity photo ops, and even a Darkside food truck court outside. Whether you’re into bone art, ink, steel, shadow, or spirit, this is a carefully curated event that celebrates the fringe without apology.

Why the haunted and paranormal side hits home

Out of all the themes Darkside embraces, the one that hooks me the most is the haunted aspect—and that might be because of my own experiences at home.

Shortly after we moved into our house, we started noticing a few strange things. Nothing too dramatic at first. We’d hear odd noises, but honestly, what older house doesn’t creak, groan, or make you question your HVAC system at 2 a.m.? We brushed it all off as normal settling. Then there was the cat, who would occasionally sit and stare into absolutely nothing. Again, easy to justify—maybe a bug, a shadow, or a reflection we couldn’t see.

“Hi Nana”: the moment that changed everything

But things got a little harder to explain when our baby daughter, who was barely talking at the time, looked into an empty space in the house and said, “Hi Nana.”

That stopped us cold.

She had never met her grandmother—my mom passed away before she was born. We hadn’t talked about her much, and “Nana” wasn’t a word floating around our daily vocabulary. Suddenly, all those little moments felt a bit different.

A medium, a mystery, and why skeptics still show up

I worked with a guy whose girlfriend was a medium, and out of pure curiosity, we invited her over. To avoid freaking out the kids, my wife walked through the house with her while we stayed outside. According to the medium, they encountered two young men who used to attend fairs on the fairgrounds where our house now sits. Apparently, they pass through from time to time and like to sit at our dining room table—which, to this day, still creaks when no one is there.

They never encountered Nana, but I know one thing for sure: my mom is my daughter’s guardian angel.

And maybe that’s why events like Darkside After Dark in Edison resonate—even with skeptics like me. Sometimes the strange, the unexplained, and the mysterious remind us there’s more going on than what we see… and that’s worth exploring.