KITTERY, Maine — What do you get when you mix aliens, oozing gore, a cannibal butcher shop, and complete darkness?
Non-stop scream, at Night Terrors Haunted Woods Walk. Its motto? “Never sleep again.”
Spanning the grounds of Take Flight Aerial Adventures on Route 1 each October, the “community haunt” features professional-level scares on a modest budget, using volunteer actors, many of whom are high school students, to shake the bones of brave attendees.
This is no amateur Halloween exhibition. Haunt director Steve Workman’s love for the spine-chilling holiday began at a young age, where he was inspired by his uncle who created oversized tombstones and sat on his porch as a scarecrow.
“I thought that was the coolest thing in the world and that’s what started it,” Workman said. In the fourth grade, he began creating small cemeteries, and then it escalated to haunted walk-throughs in his basement for his younger brother and friends. When he was in high school, he helped create a “haunted pool” with Portsmouth Recreation that ultimately won a statewide award.
People would begin to know Workman as the haunt master in 2002, when he moved his obsession to his Bridge Street yard in Kittery. It grew and grew, “until I finally had to make the decision to let it go or take it to the next level and find a business partner.”
In 2013, he launched Night Terrors in partnership with Take Flight. And each October since, they’ve been scaring the bejesus out of countless visitors.
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“We think of ourselves as a professional community haunted walk,” Workman said. “We certainly don’t have the budget of a theme park.”
Each year, the haunt has a different spectacle, and this year’s is “Sci-Corp,” a dark corporation reverse engineering extraterrestrial life forms while developing weapons.
Lorelei Gilman, a longtime friend of Workman, is the gatekeeper, and tells each group before they enter they’re being selected because “Group A didn’t make it.”
“The walk starts really subtly, with mind control technology,” Workman said. “Everyone who attends is a test subject. The first area they enter, they’re actually engaging in a type of brain wave manipulation. They keep going into a series of rooms, encountering technology and they’re seeing these horrific scenes.”
Mixed in with the sci-fi aspect, Workman said, is the “typical flavor of Halloween.” Visitors travel through boarded hallways, eventually coming to various rooms full of fright and abhorrence. There’s smoke, the smell of “charred flesh,” and eerie soundtracks playing in the background. But the soundtracks can barely be heard over the screams.
There are killer clowns from outer space, a mad dentist with “lots of drilling and screaming,” a gory and haunted children’s nursery, vampires and witches, catacombs, a laboratory and a laser swamp.
In the cannibal butcher room, get ready for lots of red.
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“To that point, they have no idea there’s really aliens involved yet,” Workman said. “It’s when they begin to transition out of that side of the haunt, they begin to see different alien life forms.”
Visitors encounter “Sci-Corp” conducting experiments creating hybrid humans, and chaos erupts.
The last section of the walk takes place in complete and utter darkness. There are 25 to 30 actors on any given night, creeping in the shadows, running wild and lurking below.
Workman said a unique piece of their program is the aspect of school-aged youth and young adult group involvement. If teams, clubs or others volunteer, they receive a piece of the ticket sales pool from that evening. York High School was one of the first groups to ever participate, and now Traip Academy, Workman said, “has become the heart and soul.”
The students use the haunted walks as fundraisers, and the school grants them community service hours in return.
Night Terrors also partnered with York Hospital’s “Choose to Be Healthy” program, which promotes substance-free fun. Workman said the mission of both Take Flight and his haunted walk is to provide a “natural high.”
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Charlie Williams, owner of Take Flight, said pairing the haunted walk with his business was a natural fit, as he’s always promoting family-based activities in the outdoors.
“Getting away from screens of all kinds, unplugging for a little while,” added Sarah Derick, vice president of operations.
Workman said people “appreciate the size and the effort that we put into it.” They repeatedly get feedback from those who come back year after year, including loyal visitors from Canada, Pennsylvania and other states.
“It takes a full year,” Workman said of the preparation. “This never stops.”
This Sunday, Oct. 28, Night Terrors will host a “scare-free” event for kids from 3 to 5 p.m. featuring Ghostbusters. Tuesday, Oct. 30 will be Night Terrors’ last scare of the season. For more information, search Night Terrors Haunted Woods Walk on Facebook.
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