If you take the letters from the same numbered squares in the grid (circled in the solution above), you spell out the bonus ...
Thank goodness I pulled myself out of that death spiral; otherwise I’d still be trying to make the puzzle. Here’s a heads-up that next week’s crossword has a meta. Good luck on cracking it.
There just wasn’t time to crash-course a full Halloween puzzle before our son would be born, so I had to submit a rerun crossword from the archives instead and set this puzzle aside yet again ...