The house and its two clocks
The Children's Museum Guild opens its 62nd annual Haunted House on Oct. 9, 2026 at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, 3000 North Meridian Street. This year's house is Fright Academy, and PNC presents it. The run ends Oct. 31.
The museum sells two sessions on two clocks. Uranus Fudge Factory Friendly Hours run Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesdays carry a second window, 3:30 to 6:30 p.m., and Sundays run noon to 5 p.m. Frightening Hours run Thursdays through Saturdays, 4 to 9 p.m.
Twenty-three daytime windows
Seventeen Tuesdays through Saturdays fall inside the run. Three Wednesdays carry two windows each, and three Sundays carry one. The count comes to 23 daytime windows across 20 open days.
The windows do not all run the same length. The Tuesday-to-Saturday window and the Sunday window each run five hours. The Wednesday second window runs three. The 23 windows carry 109 daytime hours.
The museum closes Mondays through its fall calendar, which runs Sept. 7 to Nov. 1, 2026 on hours of 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Three Mondays sit inside the house's window: Oct. 12, Oct. 19 and Oct. 26. The house carries the other 20 days.
Nine evening sessions
Eleven dates inside the run fall on a Thursday, a Friday or a Saturday. The museum states no Frightening Hours on Friday, Oct. 9 and none on Halloween, which leaves nine evenings: Oct. 10, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 29 and 30. Each runs 4 to 9 p.m., which is 45 evening hours.
Oct. 15 and Oct. 22 carry the Twice the Fright Nights sponsored by Bassett Services, where one Frightening Hours purchase buys two trips through the house. Opening day carries the daytime clock only. Halloween carries the Saturday daytime window and no evening session, which puts the last evening of the season on Friday, Oct. 30.
The day rate a booking prices against
Dayuse publishes an average day-room price of $87.43 in Indianapolis and names Quality Inn & Suites Southport as its recommended hourly property. hotelSlots sells four windows on its home page: morning 6 a.m. to noon, afternoon noon to 6 p.m., evening 6 p.m. to midnight and overnight midnight to 6 a.m. The platform states day-use rates at 30 to 75 percent below the nightly rate, no booking fee and 103,857 hotels across 46 states.
Its Indianapolis directory reads 273 hotels available in the header and 123 hotels to choose from in the body copy, with 24 of the 273 shown. Engine puts the Indianapolis average nightly rate at $128 across 1.2 million public rate observations made between May 2024 and April 2026. October reads $134, which is 5 percent above that average, and the page ranks the city 39 of 50 markets at 14 percent below the $148 median. Engine states those are the cheapest publicly posted prices at the time of each search and not negotiated or booked rates.
What the calendar hands a daytime seller
A Wednesday carries two sessions: a morning window that ends at 3 p.m. and a second window that runs to 6:30 p.m. The second window sits across the afternoon slot and the start of the evening slot. The nine evenings end at 9 p.m., inside the evening slot the platform sells.
The museum publishes free parking in its own garage off Illinois Street, connected to the building by the Skywalk. House tickets are date specific and sell separately from museum admission. The city rate lines and the directory counts above were read on 25 September 2026, and both move between reads.