We went to the 8/29 party. It was beautiful weather, we were really pleased about that. Some thoughts:
*The fireworks and Hocus Pocus shows were great! I was surprised at how many people were still there for the second show but leaving the park was much easier than on a normal night in my experience.
*The parade was OK. I felt it was pretty short. I got to see the headless horseman, though!
*My DD and her husband stood in line for two hours to see Jack Sparrow and then PhotoPass added the picture of the people behind them in line instead of their picture to our account. I'm not sure if that's fixable? She's just glad that they asked someone to take pictures with her cell phone as backup.
*The line at the Haunted Mansion for the magic shots was long until after the second parade. I really wanted that ghost driver shot and I'm glad we kept checking back (DH doesn't do long lines). My focus was to get as many magic shots as I could and I'm pleased to report that we did so with minimal waiting in lines.
*It was a 'low crowd' night but was still more crowded than I expected.
*The best costume we saw was a young guy with a chef's hat on his head. It was lit up and you could see the shadow of Remy in it. Such a great idea!
*We walked on to Buzz Lightyear, It's a Small World, and Journey Under the Sea with no wait. Pirates of the Caribbean had a posted time of 20 minutes early in the night but it took us at least 40 minutes to go through. Later in the night we rode again and the posted 15 minutes was accurate.
*My recommendation is to eat dinner before 7pm if you can, so that you won't miss any of the party activities. We didn't experience any shortages of the special treats. I can say for sure that Sleepy Hollow had the Jack Skellington and pumpkin Mickey waffles with ice cream after 8pm and the Main Street Bakery had the Mickey cinnamon bun after 9pm.
Overall, we had a good time despite it being a very long day for us. We got to the park around noon and got back to our room after 1am.