PROUDLY ANCIENT, MILDLY HAUNTED, HEAVILY CIDER-DONUTED

October around here has range. Kingfisher Tower turns 150, and we found the 1876 newspaper article that first described it. Angelica Palmer of the Telegraph School walks us through Cherry Valley, where the ghosts are on a first-name basis with the locals. Plus, our fall-with-kids guide sorts the season by age, so no teenager gets dragged to a rubber duck race against their will. Meanwhile, Fenimore Farm has been overrun by scarecrows and tractors, Fly Creek's corn mazes are swallowing visitors whole, the Richfield Springs Fire Department is launching pumpkins into orbit at Cullen Pumpkin Farm, and at The Otesaga Resort Hotel, someone gets crowned and then killed. You know, a normal month.

Come for the history. Stay for the hauntings.

If you know anything about the real Cooperstown, you know about our 60-foot stone castle on Otsego Lake that was supposedly built for no reason: Kingfisher Tower. The history is part fact, part folklore - a sewing machine fortune, a 29-year-old architect who went on to design the Dakota and the Plaza Hotels in NYC, and a national depression that may have been the real reason the whole thing got built. But 150 years later, Kingfisher Tower has a purpose that no one can argue with: it wows every visitor and resident who sees it from the water. This year it turns 150, and we dug up the original 1876 newspaper article that described it for the first time.