Ybor is a counterculture crossroads for nearly every subgenera of rebellion there is. On Seventh Avenue, a man in a full suit and a man in full steampunk attire will walk out of neighboring bars and no one thinks anything of it. Lands like these are breeding grounds for the weird and eccentric.

The Caste was born just outside of the main strip in Ybor in the early 90s, maintaining it’s dedication to being a goth-haven ever since. It’s building originally served as one of Vincent Martinez-Ybor’s cigar factories in the 1800s, but has since been converted to a church of irreverence and free expression.

Once a year, this eclectic nightclub is transformed into a Nightmare Before Christmas themed wonderland of lights and odd characters. We never thought to ask if the homage was licensed with Disney or not, but seeing that there wasn’t a team of lawyers draping blankets over the decorations, all seemed well enough.

A patron dressed as star of the night, Jack Skellington Credit: Kaylee LoPresto

The Castle features two floors and an outdoor patio. For “Hallucination Before Christmas,” three DJ booths are set up in the venue, two downstairs and one upstairs. The downstairs stages included Oogie Boogie’s Dungeon (normally the Dungeon room) and Christmas Town (the outdoor Patio,) both decorated with Disney World quality installations. In the Dungeon, some of the more eccentric artists performed from a booth shaped like Oogie Boogie’s head.

Upstairs, the Main Hall was transformed into Halloween Town, featuring large representations of characters from the movie and an impressive array of lasers that did complex patterns in multiple dimensions. Emerging from behind the DJ booth was a larger-than-life Jack Skellington rig, complete with gaunt arms and a projection-animated face. The bass in this room was overwhelming and bent the old, wooden floor with the pulsing of each note. Two large phonograph speakers sat on either side of the DJ booth like buttress cannons; it is unclear if they were functional or for decoration. Either way it was cool as fuck.

While the crowd was speckled with attendees dressed up as characters from Tim Burton’s classic cross-holiday flick, the pair wearing stilts and dressed as Jack Skellington and his dog Zero were hard to miss anywhere in the venue. At some points in the night, the Main Hall upstairs became extra packed when a protective circle had to be made around male and female aerialist performing silk rope routines from a rope in the ceiling.

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Costumed dancers performed on three platforms throughout the crowd in the main room. At times you would have three elves dancing on the boxes, at sometimes it would be three women with antlers or three women in some sort of kandi/lingerie football uniforms. People put dollar bills in their garters as they danced and one of them pulled our photographer onto the stage to dance while still taking pictures.

Walking around the club all night was a chipper old man wearing nothing but a condom, maintaining a semi-chub most of the night, a feat for someone his age. At one point he posed for pictures next to a wall of chains in the Dungeon while a woman in a black body suit puppeted two “floating” severed mannequin heads behind ghoulish DJ, Oona Dahl. As a connoisseur of all things weird, it’s hard to find a stranger scene, even in Ybor.

As they do every year, Hallucination Before Christmas held a canned food drive at the main entrance of the venue to benefit “Feeding Tampa Bay,” a major Tampa Bay food bank. Each atendee was asked to bring three cans of food to benefit victims of Hurricane Irma, last year over 2,500 lbs of food was raised.