Emerson Perrine Arrived at 1:53 a.m. on Halloween, the First Baby Born That Day at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola and the Fourth Child for a Milton, Florida Couple
Emerson Perrine will never have to explain when his birthday is. He arrived at 1:53 a.m. on Halloween, Oct. 31, 2026, the first baby born that day at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola, and the fourth child for Cady and Nate Perrine of Milton, Florida, according to a hospital news release published by FOX 10.
He weighed 8 pounds, 10 ounces and measured 20.5 inches long. The release opens with the line, “What a treat to have a Halloween birthday!”
The family behind the birth
Both Cady and Nate Perrine are graduates of Pensacola Christian College, the release says. They own Revival Coffee, a Christian coffee shop in Milton, a town in northwest Florida. The release does not give the couple’s other children’s names or ages, and it does not say how long Cady Perrine was in labor.
The hospital supplied the details itself. Ascension Sacred Heart has also provided photos and announcements for other milestone births this year and last, and local outlets have carried them.
A hospital that tracks its holiday babies
The Halloween birth is one of several the hospital has marked. On Jan. 2, 2025, WKRG reported that Everly, born at 12:09 a.m. to Maegan Mapoles and Brian Allen of Pensacola, was Ascension Sacred Heart’s first New Year’s baby, according to a hospital release. She weighed 6 pounds, 1 ounce and was one of seven babies born at the hospital on Jan. 1.
A year later, WEAR reported that Ascension Sacred Heart and Baptist Hospital each welcomed a first baby of 2026. The Ascension baby arrived at 6:10 a.m., and the station gave the parents’ first names as Shawna and Mitchell.
Later holidays have followed the same pattern. On March 17, 2026, Avery Wright was born at Ascension Sacred Heart at 7:10 a.m., weighing 7 pounds, 13 ounces and measuring 20 inches, according to Local Pulse, which called her Pensacola’s first St. Patrick’s Day baby. In June, the same outlet reported that Zena Sutton arrived at 12:56 a.m. on Father’s Day, the hospital’s first Father’s Day baby of 2026, born to Anthony Sutton and D’Ivyon Teague of Pensacola.
Inside the hospital where Emerson was born
Ascension describes its Pensacola hospital as a full-service, 547-bed hospital with 24-hour emergency care. It calls itself the leading provider of childbirth care in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, the regional high-risk pregnancy center and the area’s only OB emergency care center. The page lists a Joint Commission Level IV Maternal Care Verified designation and a Baby-Friendly Hospital designation for 2025, and says it has a Level III neonatal intensive care unit for babies born premature or sick.
The maternity numbers appear in the hospital’s own maternity FAQ. It says the Pensacola campus delivers more than 4,000 babies each year and has 20 labor and delivery beds, including five birthing suites that opened in the summer of 2020, three of them with tubs. The Level III NICU is in the adjacent Studer Family Children’s Hospital, staffed around the clock by full-time neonatologists and nurses, the page says. Certified nurse midwives also practice at the campus.
The same hospital’s Monogram Maternity center says all of its birthing suites are private, that its Nesting Place suites are designed for low-risk labor and delivery, and that three private rooms have tubs for labor. Listed amenities include aromatherapy, birthing balls, music, photography and a celebratory meal.
A separate Ascension story about a Pensacola family’s midwife-led birth says U.S. News & World Report named the hospital one of “America’s Best Hospitals for Maternity Care” for uncomplicated pregnancies, and that the birthing suites sit near the Perinatal Support Unit and the Level III NICU at Studer Family Children’s Hospital. In that account, a Pensacola mother of three named Denise said she was never alone during the birth, and described how her sons napped, snacked and watched a movie in the birthing suite while they waited for their sister to be born.
Why a Halloween birth is a little unusual
Babies born on Oct. 31 are slightly rarer than babies born on neighboring days. A Yale School of Public Health study led by Becca Levy, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine and described by Live Science, used birth certificate records from 1996 to 2006. It found that births fell by about 11.3 percent on Halloween compared with the surrounding two weeks.
The drop was largest for scheduled births, Live Science reported. Cesarean births fell about 16.9 percent and induced births about 18.7 percent, while spontaneous births dropped about 5.3 percent. The comparison group of more than 1.6 million births was around Valentine’s Day, and the Halloween group was more than 1.8 million births.
Levy said in the report that the mechanisms are not known and that this is certainly something that needs to be explored. That caveat matters here, because the study describes a pattern across millions of births and says nothing about why any one family’s baby arrived at 1:53 a.m. on a particular night.
Other Halloween-season stories from hospitals
Other families have had their own Halloween-season hospital stories this year. In Pittsburgh, a NICU nurse made more than 80 tiny Halloween costumes for babies in her unit, and in Iowa, two sisters went into labor in neighboring rooms and had sons 29 minutes apart.
For the Perrines, the details released so far are brief: a time, a weight, a length and a birthday on Halloween.
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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: Ebyabe – CC BY-SA 3.0/Wikimedia Commons
