Another version will of course be available in a few days (say, 2 or 3), so you'll have to use a command to trigger the Halloween event.
Now, about the standing NPCs, I reorganized their spawning system, mainly by replacing tons of A_RandomState frames by a unique Lua function, which made choosing any color way easier, so I thought I could just make NPCs more colored. Maybe it's a bad idea though? Also the same thing will happend with moving NPCs if I let that unchanged, it's just a matter of time.
About the text, I guess you were talking about the message spawning on level load? If so, that's indeed not what I intended to do, but I had some problems that I couldn't get rid of, so I had to let it that way. You probably remember, older versions used to have some odd error messages randomly displaying in the console, which were caused by the use of commands scripts for NPC messages or text in general. In order to remove them, I had to replace these commands scripts by Lua scripts. It worked fine with regular texts, but I had some issues with displaying texts directly in console, since apparently COM_BufAddText seems to not work as expected. The only decent way I've found to handle that until now is to use CONS_Printf but it is shown outside of the console. I still changed it so in the next release it'll only be shown the first time you load a level.