10/24/2026
Senior year, 1991. It came in on Halloween night and Kellogg was buried! If you were a Minnesota kid like I was it was wild 🎃
The Halloween Blizzard of 1991 is the storm that gave Minnesota its favorite bragging rights. It arrived just days after the Twins won the World Series, as if the state had not been given enough joy for one week. The forecast called for flurries, and what showed up was three days of snow that people still describe in the same voice they use for family legends.
It began like a trick. On Thursday, October 31, freezing rain and wet flakes rolled in around trick or treat time, and kids headed out in costumes anyway. Plenty of them wore snowmobile suits over their capes and cardboard masks. Some trick or treaters reportedly showed up at doors on snowmobiles. By midnight, the Twin Cities airport had measured about eight inches, more than any October on record at that point, and the sky was just getting started.
The next day buried everything. Another 18.5 inches fell on November 1, and the Twin Cities finished with 28.4 inches, the largest single storm in its history, a record that still stands. Farther north, Duluth got 36.9 inches, with 24.1 of them in a single day, and the winds blew the snow sideways for what felt like forever. Snowblowers sold out in a flash. A neighbor who owned a working one became the most popular person on the block, and a bag of jelly beans might have bought a driveway.
The storm had a way of bringing people together. Cars disappeared under drifts, schools closed, and roads turned into white tunnels. The snow was wet and heavy, strong enough to damage a number of roofs, so folks climbed up with shovels to clear them before the weight became a problem. Strangers pushed stuck cars, shared extension cords, and handed out coffee. When the clouds finally broke, the temperature dropped to three below zero on November 4, the earliest subzero reading the Twin Cities had ever recorded.
Then came the candy. Parents everywhere discovered that a bowl of Halloween treats makes a spectacular emergency supply. Kids ate fun size Snickers for breakfast, built snow forts that stayed all winter, and returned to school with stories that grew taller than the drifts. A pumpkin sat on a porch with a snow hat for days, glowing faintly under a white blanket.
That is why Minnesotans still say the date out loud with a little twinkle. They remember the frozen costumes, the shoveling, the neighbors, and the quiet after the storm, when every street was soft and silent. If anyone from out of state asks whether it ever really snows in October, the answer is simple. In 1991, we had a Halloween you could not walk out of.
