A tortured scream rang through the woods as a masked man stepped out of the fog and revved his chainsaw.
Rebekah Lampart gasped.
“I get scared really easily,” she explained, laughing with relief.
The osteopathic medicine graduate student glanced at her 6-month-old son, Elijah, sleeping on his father’s chest.
“They said he’d be fine, but I’m not so sure,” Lampart said.
As the line crept toward the entrance of the Fenner Nature Center’s second annual Haunted Forest, the three were whisked into graveyard-littered woods filled with volunteers dressed as cackling witches and evil monsters.
“It’s really fun scaring people,” said 11-year-old Katie Gordon. “I’m a headless dude, and I get to have a torch.”
Gordon volunteered for her second year at the haunted forest with the Foster Community Center Youth Advisory Board.
“This year’s so much better,” she said. “But last year I really scared people. One kid pushed me because he was so scared.”
Brett Kaschinske, assistant manager of leisure services for Lansing Parks and Recreation, said the Haunted Forest drew a crowd of 450 last year. And this year volunteers said about 800 turned out.
“There are a lot of haunted houses, but no one has a haunted forest,” he said.
Ellen Ojala, a park, recreation and tourism resources junior, joined friends from a parks and recreation class to help with the haunting. “We had to do a group project,” she explained. “So we’re going to paint our faces, hide and scare kids in the tunnel.”
In addition to the “Scary Trail,” the center offered a “Friendly Trail” where children would walk with a friendly witch through an interactive story. But many children chose to enter the frightening section.
Six-year-old Kirsten Smalley yelped as she stepped into a makeshift house on the trail and looked up at the dangling arm inches above her head. “That was too scary,” she said after she exited the forest. “I wouldn’t do that again.”
