SUMMERSIDE, P.E.I. — With Halloween quickly approaching, the fourth annual Haunted Farm will be returning to Summerside, presented by the College of Piping.
The tradition was started by the recently closed Spotlight School of Arts.
Reasha Walsh, the theatre program manager with the college, has been part of the event since it started in 2015 and is now heading the project, with the help of fellow theatre instructor Monica Kani.
The event will be held at Kool Breeze Farms, made up of two ‘barns’ or greenhouses and a slightly - squashed - corn maze, decorated with spooky furnishings.
“We’re still going to use the corn maze section that Ian (owner of Kool Breeze) lets us use every year. It's slightly squished, thanks to hurricane Dorian. You can see over it, so it’s not much of a maze. But at night, and we’ve put in a lot of scary stuff, I think it’ll as equally as creepy if not more,” said Walsh.
Along with their creepy factors, the crew has paid homage to the king of horror literature, Stephen King and his terrifying character Pennywise from "IT".
“We always like to do a little wink to ‘IT’, because people like it and we feature clowns in a barn. We consider barn one as a funhouse, it has all these themed rooms. And barn two is more of what it's like to be in a real haunted house. So barn one may have clowns, may have an evil lab and barn two may have a kitchen or a bathroom.”
Some of the students of the program have gotten involved, including Amber Phillips, Jane Carragher and Paige Hupman.
This will be Amber's third year with helping with the Haunted Farm and said she’s excited to take on a new role.
“I’ve played a ‘little girl’ for the past two years. I'm excited to be playing a clown this year. It’ll be fun since no one likes clowns.”
Her favourite part of scaring people is the unexpected reactions.
“It’s fun watching people scream. And it breaks stereotypes. You usually think a group of teenage girls getting scared, not the boy pushing his girlfriend through first because he’s the one that’s terrified.”
This will be Jane and Paige’s first year with the spooktacular, and they both hope to land Amber's former role.
“I’d like to play one of the little girls,” said Paige.
“Same, cause they’re so freaky,” added Jane.
The scariest room is in barn two, said Paige.
“There’s this room here," said Paige, as she looked around the greenhouse. "It has this creepy feeling. I think some people are going to freak out.”
Kani said the best part of the scaring is the theatre of it all.
“The whole thing is so utterly ridiculous, and it’s very much like the exhilaration of applause, except it's screaming. People will come out (of the maze) and say ‘That was the coolest thing ever’ so it’s very rewarding.”
For more information, visit Facebook.com/koolbreezehauntedfarm
