Planning under way for popular haunted town with presale tickets at Frontier Days
Planning is already under way for another scary Halloween experience at the Haunted Town of Lil-Sur-Mer, which will raise funds for non-profit and community organizations in Swift Current and area.
This popular Halloween walking/ride tour was sold out last year and there will be an opportunity to already get presale tickets during Frontier Days in Swift Current from June 29 to July 2.
Andy Keys, the non-profit organization’s board president, said they will be participating in the Frontier Days parade on July 1 and they will be present at the exhibition grounds with a table and the Last Ride wagon.
“It will be taking people from the front gate around and dropping them off at certain places around the exhibition grounds,” he explained. “That will just go on a volunteer basis. A donation if someone wants to get on and they want to pay. They can throw us $5 and if they don’t, then no big deal. We’re getting a little bit of coverage, and we want to see if we can do some pre-sales of our tickets as well at that time.”
He expected their table will be set up in the vicinity of the radio station trailer, between Hansen Park and the H-hut. The presale tickets will be part of their goal to do advance ticket sales ahead of Halloween, which will allow haunted town visitors to just enjoy their experience.
“We like to do some pre-sales, because as we’ve done the sales in the past, we get a phone number and people call that phone number and we book them their time slot,” he said. “It went very well last year. We’ve never done this until last year. So everything was done by e-transfer. There was no having to handle money when we get out there. When we cut down on that time to handle money and everything is paid ahead of time, we can get them in and immerse them quicker.”
Their goal is to provide visitors a fun and scary experience during their tour of the haunted town, which is located south of Swift Current at Springfeld. At other times the site is used as a paintball field with a variety of buildings and structures in a fictional town called Lil-Sur-Mer.
“That is my dedication to a D-day theme,” he said. “If you look at any of the towns along the French coast where D-day was involved, they were all ‘sur-Mer’, which is on the beach or on the sea in French. I’m very passionate about veterans and D-day landings and things like that through past events that I’ve done at the Legion. So I wanted to keep the name, because in the paintball season this is our tribute to D-day.”
At Halloween the site becomes a haunted town and the buildings are used to set up various scary scenarios. The event has taken place since 2017 and all funds raised are donated to various groups, programs, and organizations within Swift Current and surrounding areas. The event has raised over $60,000 during the past five years.
“It’s always been a charity thing,” he said. “Last year was our biggest year and we’ve gone up every year. That first year we raised a couple of thousand dollars, and it’s gone up every year. Last year we raised just over $19,000. That’s all from ticket sales.”
Haunted Town of Lil-Sur-Mer became a registered not-for-profit organization in 2022, known as Haunted Town Tours SK Inc. It all started when Rene Panasiuk, the organization’s vice-president of the board and a friend of Keys, suggested the idea of creating a haunted town at the paintball field.
“It seemed like a hell of an idea,” Keys recalled. “We thought anybody can put on a haunted house, but can we pull off a haunted town. So the first year we literally had two weeks to put this together. There was Rene, myself, our wives, a couple of our friends.”
The event has continued to grow and evolve since then. The basic format currently consists of tour rides on the Ghoul Bus or Last Ride wagon to six or seven attractions, where participants will walk through each attraction and encounter a variety of surprises.
They change the attractions each year to keep things interesting and different. Themes in previous years for various buildings included a butcher’s shop and a witch’s house.
“We’ve had vampire houses, we’ve had zombies, and we always have clowns,” he said. “We probably will always have clowns, because for some reason they scare the hell out of everybody. One of the buildings is built as a church and it looks like a church from the outside. So you have to wind through this little place. We had a wedding scene in there one year with a corpse bride and then you go through to the crypt into the back and it’s pretty terrorizing for some people.”
The response to this haunted town during the initial year of the event was already positive and tickets have sold out for the past three years.
“The first year, when we had some particularly bad weather and it was only over a few nights, we raised a couple of thousand dollars and we were like how did we do that?” he said. “On the first year, even though the weather was terrible, we were still getting people rolling up until 11 o’clock at night, because we didn’t pre-book tickets at that time. … It’s snowing, it’s sleet, it’s howling across the town, and people still want to go out. That gave us the drive to really do more. So we don’t stop it for anything, or we haven’t had to. Last year it snowed and one of the vehicles got stuck. So we just got another vehicle and pulled it with another vehicle to carry on the ride. The show must go on.”
It takes over 30 dedicated volunteers to organize and host the event. They have various roles, ranging from ride assistants to characters and scarers at the different attractions. Tours take place on several weekend nights in the run-up to Halloween.
The Haunted Town of Lil-Sur-Mer is different from any other haunted Halloween attraction due to its duration and size. It takes about 40 to 45 minutes to complete the tour and it involves several attractions on a single site. Last year’s event attracted over 200 people per night, and it took place on six nights.
“We have had people from as far as Winnipeg,” he said. “We get buses coming down from Regina. ... So word has got around and it’s kind of good. I like it.”
Sponsorship packages are available for businesses that want to get involved with this Halloween effort to raise funds for charitable purposes. Requests for donations can be submitted online by Swift Current and area not-for-profit, volunteer service, and community organizations.
For more information about sponsorship opportunities or to submit a donation request, go to the Haunted Town of Lil-Sur-Mer website at: www. hauntedtownoflilsurmer.ca