If you take the letters from the same numbered squares in the grid (circled in the solution above), you spell out the bonus ...
Won’t you take me to the strangest of places?
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 ...