Tag: Halloween

Fright Night – What a Hoot!

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Written by Deanna Hutchins

I travelled from Renmark to meet my son who was my team mate, at Mt Crawford on a lovely Saturday afternoon.  Witches pointed us to where we should camp and we settled in.  To get our maps, it seemed to be overly important that we had a whistle within easy reach so we could blow the ‘safe’ sound as ‘screams will be disregarded’. This seemed a little over the top.

A lot of effort had gone into costumes.  A couple of zombies even started the event running with a stiff-legged zombie run; that was commitment to their characters.

We had set our course and scooted off to the north, quickly finding ourselves alone and wondering if we would see anyone else during the event; we need not have worried about that. A couple of checkpoints in and we arrived at “Ruin of despair” where the ghost of a little girl was wandering around in her night dress.  Completely freaked out by this, we ducked and weaved around the ruin to avoid her and buzz the checkpoint.  As we skedaddled out of the ruin we ran straight into some masked person standing on the other side of the road. Neither of us can tell you what they looked like as we both ran screaming in what we hoped was the right direction.

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Scary, scary! 4-hour Halloween rogaine

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Ooh, getting to Control #72 we had to avoid The Ferryman

By Mike Round

Take a mix of the ghoulish and the macabre, the living dead, the criminally insane and the deadly virus transmitters! Add to it Voodoo dolls, corpses and coffins and bats in the belfry! This and the accompanying scenes of nightmare-inducing horror was central to the scene of Saturday’s Halloween Fright Night 4-hour rogaine set in almost 25 square km of Mt Crawford forest.

The more than 70 teams and over 200 individuals who joined in for the night weren’t there as the audience but were on-stage in the thick of things, with most dressed up in the Halloween spirit, and some fantastically so. None of us could have ever foreseen the scary controls and the whole amazing scenes of haunted ruins and houses, screams in the night, the manic bowing of ghouls with violin and cello. A control with flashing lights and sound effects! Another deep inside a spider-web shrouded log. The fingers of recent victims of vampires protruding from the eerie still dam waters. The shining eyes of a ghastly face staring up at ‘Rocky Horror’! The House of Horrors with its catatonic zombie and spell-casting witch. And the haunted dolls, far more than most of us care to meet!

Will we ever again see the likes of such a rogaine? I very much doubt it but you never know – I rather suspect it was a one-off. If that’s so then I am so glad that Des Norman phoned me one day and suggested that we form a team. That was my great fortune! What a fun event and one where the only advantage of getting a high score was that you got to witness more scenes of horror!

Many thanks to the wonderful team of people who put this event on – a huge amount of inspiration and work, which I know they all loved being involved with. And thanks to the forest rangers for their enthusiasm for this event with at least one, to my knowledge, providing some of the spooky control effects! And thanks especially to the course-setters and coordinator, and source of the initial inspiration Karen Creepy Wishart, Sally Mutant Caston and Mitzi Howling Krahling! An unforgettable event! Scary, Scary!