The Toke Street Halloween Haunted House is back for its fifth year of serving up scares and collecting donations for the local food bank.
“I love Halloween. It gives me time to spend time with my friends and with my family,” says Marc Lacroix, who runs the event with his wife Crystal and their three children, along with other extended family members and numerous volunteers.
They started running the haunted house as a way to continue celebrating the holiday with their kids, who were beginning to get a bit too old for trick-or-treating.
“My oldest has gone to university this year, so she’s not part of this and I can see the difference, and I spend a little more time with my son and my youngest daughter. It brings family together, it brings people together, it brings community together. It’s for a good cause,” Lacroix says.
“The Porcupine food bank is who I’ve been doing it with since day one. I feel like they need the help and get the least exposure out of everybody, and it started with them. In my first meeting bringing stuff in I realized that I needed to keep doing it,” he says.
The cost of admission to the haunted house is non-perishable food items or monetary donations, and 100 per cent of those donations go to the South Porcupine Food Bank.
The haunted house itself is the result of hundreds of hours of work by Lacroix and other volunteers including family, friends, and high school students. Lacroix says owning his own business as a realtor allows him the flexibility to take October off work to prepare for the event.
Volunteers from First Class Construction help build the structure itself, which takes about six to eight weeks. In previous years, Purolator and other local businesses have volunteered trucks and vans to transport the food donations to the food bank. All decorations and materials used are either donated or paid for out of Lacroix’s own pocket. The event is, at its heart, a community effort.
What started as a relatively small event with 200 visitors and 15 volunteers has since grown considerably — last year more than 1,500 people passed through, collectively donating just over 2,000 pounds of food. Pickings at the food bank seem to be slim at the end of October, after Thanksgiving, which is what made it Lacroix’s charity of choice.
“The reason we keep doing it is because it’s always around that time when they’re very bare. They go from nothing to everything in one day, so you can feel the appreciation that they have for it,” Lacroix says.
Unlike many other Halloween activities, the Toke Street Haunted House ran during the pandemic. Lacroix says that not running it was simply not an option for them with the amount of donations they rake in.
“We had the Porcupine Health Unit involved, we went through mandates, we had all kinds of stuff. Because of the amount we do for charity, it was too hard not to, so we did it anyway. And it was at that point when normalcy is something that we were looking for anyway,” he says.
Walking through the entire haunted house takes about three and a half minutes, during which visitors can expect to weave their way through a maze of different scares and attractions.
“It progressively gets worse and worse until you get towards the end where you’re thankful that it’s over, but want to do it again,” Lacroix says.
“I’ve had people come on the first day and drag their friends on the second day. I’ve had people come through and make it 10 feet in and run out the front. We’ve had people come back every single year, and it’s growing,” he says.
Lacroix says the lineups start forming as early as 5:30 p.m. for the attraction that opens at 7 p.m. At times last year, the wait was about an hour and a half. But everyone says it is worth it.
“I think it was two years ago that it was raining pretty heavily, and people waited because they heard good things about it. We run it for two days because we realized really quickly that we have to run it for at least two days,” Lacroix says.
The haunted house follows a different theme each year — some of the previous ones include zombies and horror movies.
“This year we’re aiming towards a clown theme. Everyone’s reaction to it has been, ‘oh, God,’ because clowns aren’t supposed to be scary but everyone has that same eerie feeling about them,” Lacroix says.
“Two years in a row the first people coming through have fallen to the floor and peed their pants, so it’s not for anybody who’s really chicken. But we have safety measures in place, and we have spot captains in place to make sure we have a process in case something does happen,” he says.
The Toke Street Halloween Haunted House runs from 7 - 10 p.m. on Oct. 28 and Oct. 31. It is sponsored by Marc Lacroix, Evans Bragonolo & Sullivan, First Class Construction, Ace Home Hardware, and Typo-Press Printers Ltd., with special thanks to Marc, Crystal, Chanel, Cédric, and Jaylen Lacroix, Stephane and Natalie Loyer, as well as Josee and James Hagger.
For updates or more information, visit the event’s Facebook page.
