WCBI-TV Halloween Houses of Horror: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the WCBI-TV Halloween Houses of Horror contest?

Halloween Houses of Horror is a seasonal audience contest operated by WCBI-TV, a television station headquartered at 201 5th Street South in Columbus, Mississippi. The station promoted the vote on its own news site with the sentence, 'Voting is now open in the WCBI and FOX 4 Halloween Houses of Horror Contest.' The balloting itself is carried on the station's contest hub at wcbi.secondstreetapp.com and runs on the Second Street platform, whose registration for the promotion lists the type UGCVoting/UGCVotingPhoto, a format that pairs photographs submitted by participants with a public vote.

In shape, this programme sits in the same family as Mississippi's local best-of ballots, not beside sport, music or pageant formats: supporters compare decorated houses side by side, and the entry that collects the most support finishes ahead. That makes it closer to a community showcase than to a judged competition, because the audience alone decides the outcome.

WCBI operates the ballot inside a larger portfolio of audience promotions hosted under the same organization on Second Street, ranging from a long-running Weather Roadshow survey to seasonal galleries and cash drawings. That matters for readers because it shows the Halloween vote sits inside an established contest operation rather than on a standalone page. The hub address, the promotion type and the station's own announcement are the fixed points a supporter can rely on; everything else about rules and divisions lives on the ballot.

When did the Halloween Houses of Horror vote run?

The confirmed cycle ran in 2025. Voting opened on October 6, 2025 and closed on November 1, 2025, so the ballot stayed live across the whole of late October and finished just after Halloween. The listing now carries a closed status, and no later cycle is attached to it.

Only a single edition of the programme is proven. This is the first confirmed edition; whether it returns next year is not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Several facts a voter would normally look for sit outside the published page. No category roster accompanies the Halloween ballot on WCBI's published page, so the names and the count of any divisions beyond the overall house vote remain unstated. The page likewise carries no vote limit, no repeat-voting rule and no eligibility text; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Whether houses are entered or nominated before voting begins is also left undescribed.

Timeline of the confirmed window

The useful takeaway for planning is the shape of the calendar rather than any promise of a repeat: an opening at the start of October, a close in early November, and a stretch spanning late October into the days after Halloween.

How does a supporter cast a vote in the Halloween Houses of Horror contest?

The mechanic is straightforward once the ballot is live. A supporter opens the contest page at wcbi.secondstreetapp.com/Halloween-Houses-of-Horror, scrolls the entries, and each entry presents a photograph of a decorated house. Choosing a favorite and submitting the vote is the whole action; no judging panel, no essay and no entry fee appear anywhere on the listing.

The photo pairing matters in practice. Because the promotion registers as UGCVoting/UGCVotingPhoto, the thing being weighed is an image of a house rather than a written description, so a supporter's decision happens at a glance. Entries photographed clearly tend to communicate faster than ones shot in poor light, which shapes how support accumulates across the window.

Nothing on the listing describes an account requirement, a login wall or a per-device restriction, so the simplest reading is that the page behaves like a standard public poll until WCBI states otherwise. If the station adds rules for a future cycle, they would surface on the ballot itself, which is why checking the live page beats relying on memory of the 2025 listing.

What the vote is not

It is not a sweepstakes entry, even though WCBI runs separate drawings on the same hub; the Halloween promotion is registered as a voting format rather than a simple sweepstakes. And it is not a sprawling multi-category survey of the kind the state's newspaper ballots run; the subject is decorated houses, full stop.

Where does this ballot fit among Mississippi's other voting contests?

Mississippi already carries a dense field of broad best-of ballots: Best of Coastal Mississippi, Best of the Best Jackson run through the Clarion Ledger, Best of Oxford from the Oxford Eagle, the Daily Journal Readers Choice in Tupelo, the statewide Best of Mississippi, and the 2026 Best of the Best. Those competitions spread many categories across a whole market for months at a time. Halloween Houses of Horror does the opposite: a single seasonal subject, a compact window, and a photo-driven ballot that lives or dies on Halloween enthusiasm.

Within WCBI's own portfolio the programme sits beside the WCBI Viewers' Choice Awards, the station's broader audience-vote franchise, along with the Teacher of the Month gallery that opened on August 18, 2026 and runs to June 1, 2027, and the 2026 Q4 $15,000 Sweepstakes scheduled from November 2 to December 9, 2026. The Halloween ballot is the only member of that group keyed to a holiday and to physical places people decorate.

That combination, a television station, a holiday theme and a photo vote, is what separates it from the newspaper-run readers' polls scattered around the state. A reader weighing options in Mississippi is effectively choosing between year-round breadth and a short seasonal burst, and the two serve completely different impulses.

How can a supporter strengthen a house's chances on this ballot?

Because the 2025 window ran from October 6 into November 1, support built early had weeks to compound, while a push begun in the final days had far less room to work. A practical starting point is visibility away from the ballot: the entries are photographs, so sharing the image together with the ballot address gives friends something concrete to find and back.

The station publishes no policy on the ballot about organized or paid support, so anyone considering outside help should read WCBI's terms and the live page before committing to anything. General tactics for public votes, from timing to outreach, are collected in how to get more votes online, and the service options for award-style ballots are laid out on buy award votes. Neither changes what the ballot permits; only the organizer's own conditions do.