Five teams of hospital staff and volunteers spent Thursday at Shriners Children's in Salt Lake City turning ordinary wheelchairs into Halloween showstoppers, building more than 20 custom costumes in a single day. Nine-year-old Jackson rolled out of the hospital as a Savannah Bananas baseball player riding a custom-made motorcycle, one of the standout builds from this year's event alongside a Zeus-themed costume and a San Francisco 49ers mascot Sourdough Sam getup.
The annual wheelchair Halloween costume clinic, held Oct. 22, relies on what organizers call pit crews, five teams that use power tools and spray paint to custom-engineer each costume around a child's own wheelchair, according to KSL News. Raegan Holbrook, the hospital's director of marketing and communications, said the idea for the clinic grew out of feedback from parents of children who use wheelchairs, the station reports. Those parents had described how stairs and other obstacles can leave kids who use wheelchairs feeling left out of traditional door-to-door trick-or-treating.
Building Costumes Around Everyday Mobility
The clinic's goal, per the same account, is to design costumes that incorporate each child's wheelchair while still making sure they get their share of candy. Clarisa Johnston, whose 9-year-old son Jackson looks forward to the event every year, said the clinic lets his everyday mobility device become part of the costume itself rather than something to work around. She said Jackson has worn his costume to school on Halloween in past years, and watching other kids react has been one of her favorite parts.
Johnston said the biggest annual hurdle isn't the costume build itself but the logistics afterward — fitting the finished creation into her car and then getting it through the front door at home. Still, she said, it's worth the effort when it makes her son smile, a sentiment that echoes the broader purpose the hospital says the clinic serves. Shriners Children's Hospital says the event addresses patients' emotional and social needs in addition to the orthopedic and physical care the hospital provides from birth through age 18, according to Shriners Children's.
A Program That Has Grown Over the Years
This year's one-day build with five pit crews reflects how much the event has scaled up since it began in the hospital's wheelchair department roughly five years before 2020, according to deseret.com, which reported the program had decorated 147 wheelchairs in total by October 2020. That outlet also reported the program's costs are now built into the hospital's official budget, even as donations continue to cover the expense. Spirit Halloween's Spirit of Children program has sponsored the clinic in past years and had raised more than half a million dollars for the hospital's child life department since 2010, Shriners Children's has said.
Attendance has fluctuated year to year across available reports. KUTV once described a clinic serving 28 children as the largest in the event's first three years, while kjzz.com reported the clinic helped more than 40 children in 2022. A separate CBS News report put one year's total at 32 children, calling it the largest group since the program's founding four years earlier. The current clinic's exact number of participating children in 2026 was not specified beyond the more than 20 costumes built.
From Robotic Mastodons to Rocket Ships
Volunteers have built an eclectic menagerie of wheelchair costumes over the years. The 2020 clinic, according to deseret.com, set out to transform a record 41 wheelchairs into creations including Batmobiles, boats and robotic mastodons, while Shriners Children's own recap of that year described more than 40 costumes completed. In 2022, kjzz.com reported volunteers spend weeks designing, engineering and sourcing materials before assembling costumes alongside children and their families, producing that year's lineup of an Ewok, a cowgirl in a covered wagon, a raptor riding in a Jurassic Park jeep, a train conductor and Cinderella in a carriage.
Other years have brought a DJ spinning records, Superman emerging from a phone booth and Rapunzel in her tower, as CBS News reported, along with a Top Gun fighter pilot and an astronaut riding a rocket ship described by KUTV. CBS News also noted that volunteers often rely on simple materials like cardboard, PVC pipe, paint and glue to bring the designs to life, while hospital staff have said the design and construction process for each wheelchair usually takes around two hours. Whatever the build, the goal stays the same: letting a child's wheelchair become the centerpiece of the costume rather than an obstacle, making the child, in Shriners Children's own words, the center of positive attention on Halloween.
