By Laura Walter

Autumn is coming, and as we count down to a blessed coolness that everyone’s been anticipating, we are proud to publish the Fall 2023 edition of Bay to the Beach.

This quarterly magazine is like a travel guide to Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “We’re trying to highlight cool places around the peninsula that are just an hour or two drive away,” I always tell people.

In this month’s magazine, we found ourselves embracing the chills, spooks and thrills that accompany those longer autumn nights.

So, when we learned that a history-based tourism agency hosts ghostly nighttime tours in various small towns, I (a self-proclaimed “chicken” who was too scared to read “Goosebumps” in elementary school) boldly signed up for what Chesapeake Ghost Walks calls their “scariest tour” in Pocomoke City. Did we see any ghosts? I’m not giving anything away! Grab the magazine for the full experience. But I’ll say this: it was fun, but I definitely got the willies while trekking through the pitch-black woods in a single-file line.

Spirits continued to appear as we pursued other stories in this edition. The 101-year-old Everett Theatre in Middletown (a Main Street legacy) is hosting two fun events this fall, themed around encounters with “the other side” (hosted by a paranormal team and a psychic medium).

Even when we dug through our readers’ fantastic photos for the Fall Cover Contest and chose that charming little crab—it wasn’t until later we realized it’s a ghost crab! (Spookiness abounds!)

In addition to all of that, this magazine finds other excellent adventures: a tranquil day trip to Smith Island; a Dover chef experimenting with new ingredients (“a wizard” of flavor, according to one diner); Hispanic Heritage Month in Chestertown; festivals of art, music, culture and much more.

The magazine will be inserted into your local paper over the course of one week: the Delaware State News on Aug. 27 (today!); the Salisbury Independent on Aug. 29; the Dorchester Banner on Aug. 30; and the (Crisfield-Somerset) County Times on Aug. 30.

So get reading, get some ideas, and choose your own adventure!

Bay to the Beach: Byways is a regular column in which we explore interesting places and projects on the Delmarva Peninsula. Videos and more photos at baytobaynews.com/bay-to-the-beach-byways