A-‘maze’-ing terrors await the brave at Leisure Farms

Enjoy the challenges of a corn maze? Thrills and chills? What about haunted barns? If the answer is yes, Leisure Farms in Sturgeon Falls is the place to be this Saturday, when Fright Night returns from the grave.

On hiatus for almost two years, Leisure Farms is bringing back their popular Fright Night event. Best known for supplying the region with all matter of berries and vegetables, come Halloween season, the farm likes to indulge in more frightful delicacies.

Enter the Haunted Corn maze. The farm has a corn maze open to the public on weekends, but come Fright Night, this maze opens in the evening, and those who enter will not be alone.

After all, once October darkness falls, the maze reveals its haunted nature. So not only do you have to find your way out, but you have to keep your wits about you while being terrorized by a host of ghouls and unknown Halloween atrocities.

Nobody truly knows what awaits in the maze come full dark. There may even be clowns.

Mitch Deschatelets works on the farm, and always looks forward to the Fright Night event. He mentioned that most people finish the maze in about 40 minutes, but that time “greatly varies between individual” maze runners.

And so far everyone who enters has made it out, so those skeletons you might see en route are probably props, not tragic reminders of participant failures from yesteryear.

“There are so many employees inside the maze, if someone really can’t find the exit, we’re there to help them out,” Deschatelets reassured.

“Nobody gets to sleep in the maze,” he joked.

Once through the maze, enjoy the moment of relief and self-accomplishment, because next up is the Haunted Barn, where as you can imagine, the horror ratchets up.

This year’s event is on “a smaller scale than one we did in the past,” Deschatelets said, adding that if all goes well, they will possibly do another closer to Halloween.

As for whether Deschatelets will partake in scaring the visitors himself, oh yes, he will. However, whether he comes through the corn as a zombie, ghost, or chainsaw wielding maniac, remains unknown.

“I can’t tell,” he said. “It will be a secret.”

Yet another mystery to confront while navigating the macabre maze.

Leisure Farms is located at 744 Quesnel Road in Sturgeon Falls. Fright Night takes place this Saturday at 7:30, 8:00 and 8:30, and tickets are $25 per person.

For updates (and more pictures of kids posing with pumpkins than you can shake a stick at) follow their Instagram or Facebook. Tickets must be purchased in advance on their website.

Best to leave the children at home for this one, as the farm bills this as an adult event. Too scary for the little ones.

David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.