SALEM — The huge Halloween crowds last weekend included a record 9,000 train passengers who purchased commuter rail tickets to Salem.
The MBTA sold 6,026 Haunted Happenings tickets — more than double last year's number — at the ticket windows and at a table set up at North Station in Boston, according to MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo.
In addition, the MBTA sold 1,166 tickets from Beverly Depot to Salem, 25 tickets from Endicott College and an estimated 2,000 tickets on the trains, although a final number is not available yet, Pesaturo said.
"Ridership was probably up more than 50 percent over last year," Pesaturo said in an e-mail. "By way of comparison, North Station ticket windows sold 2,245 tickets last year versus 4,526 this year."
What's more, a record 5,070 people visited the Information Booth on the Essex Street pedestrian mall, and nearly 9,000 people stopped by the Salem Regional Visitor Center on Halloween — nearly double last year, according to the National Park Service, which operates both sites.
Police estimated as many as 100,000 people visited downtown Salem over the course of the day on Halloween. Officials attributed the record crowds to Halloween falling on a Saturday, as well as the beautiful weather with temperatures in the 70s.
"I definitely think folks were really getting the message to take public transportation," Mayor Kim Driscoll said the day after Halloween.
The number of visitors at the Info Booth and the Visitor Center were particularly high considering the Visitor Center closed at 5 p.m. and the booth closed at 7 p.m. on Halloween, according to Michelle Blees, a ranger with the National Park Service.
The MBTA sold the special Haunted Happenings tickets for $10 round-trip from Boston to Salem and half-price from Beverly Depot to Salem, Pesaturo said.
To cope with the crowds, the MBTA ran four additional train sets for a total of 16 extra trips, and one of those trains was made up of seven double-decker coaches. That was in addition to the regularly scheduled 26 trips on Saturdays, he said.
"The one train made up of seven double-deck coaches alone holds 1,225 seated and perhaps 400 more standees," Pesturo said. "This seven-car double-deck train made four trips — three back-and-forth to Boston and one round-trip to Rockport."
Overall, the Park Service saw a nearly 7 percent increase in the number of visitors throughout October compared with October 2008, and visitation rates are up nearly 6 percent so far this calendar year.
"Even with bad weather on a couple of weekends," the Park Service's Blees wrote in an e-mail, "the number of visitors to the Visitor Center (in October) exceeded last year."
The number of people who visited the volunteer-staffed Information Booth, at Essex and Washington streets, surged from 13,675 in October 2008 to 16,684 in October 2009.
Staff writer Amanda McGregor can be reached at amcgregor@gloucestertimes.com.
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