No, it’s not blood. It’s just strawberry sauce adorning a mask that was on one of the walls in the Cheesecake Laboratory, the haunted house Haunt Camp held in 2022. 

ENTERPRISE — Before the windstorm, this was the story that Haunt Camp participants were creating for this year’s haunted house experience:

You and the other crew members of a spaceship are headed to the Andromeda galaxy to colonize a planet. It’s a long trip, requiring the crew to spend years in hibernation. When you wake up, you discover — to your horror — that something has gone wrong with the life-system hydroponic system in the ship: The plants inside the system have mutated. And not in good ways.

Plenty of other science fiction stories have been built around flimsier concepts.

But all that was before the windstorm on Friday, Oct. 4 severely damaged the sets under construction for Haunt Camp.

“This enormous, devastating windstorm passed through two weeks before we were supposed to do our production, and just leveled the set,” said JR Rymut, the founder and leader of Haunt Camp, in which teenagers design and build a haunted house. “It was very much a divine sign that, OK, we’re going to have to reorient expectations this year. We’re not going to have a haunted house production like we had the last couple of years.”

Fortunately, planning for a related event — an Oct. 25 “Spooky Story Slam” at Cloverleaf Hall — was already in the works. In collaboration with Fishtrap, the writers’ organization based in Enterprise, and the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture, the “Spooky Story Slam” will go on — and will include the Haunt Camp sets that could be salvaged.

In the first half of the story slam, participants will read classic tales of terror (but not too terrifying, because the event is meant to be family-friendly). The tales will be augmented with the occasional theatrical touch — creepy sound effects, for example.

In the second half of the “Spooky Story Slam,” selected finalists will read their own creepy stories and a panel of judges will award prizes.

(The submission deadline for stories is Oct. 21. Stories can be emailed to jennifer@fishtrap.org. Stories should be short enough to be read in five minutes or less.)

The slam begins at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 25 at Cloverleaf Hall, 600 NW First St. in Enterprise.

Flights of imagination 

Let’s go back now to that troubled trip to the Andromeda galaxy: That idea was dreamed up by the students in Haunt Camp. Helping to guide those flights of imagination among the teenagers in the program is one of the reasons why Haunt Camp appeals to Rymut.

“There’s no shortage of creativity when they all get together and it just percolates,” she said.

Part of the appeal also is that Haunt Camp, unlike other art efforts, is a collaborative process. “And so we come up with something that’s so much better than any single person could have come up with,” she said.

Previous Haunt Camp experiences have offered a haunted Cheesecake Laboratory and an ill-fated cruise to the Bermuda Triangle.

Rymut came to Wallowa County with a decade of experience in museum exhibit fabrication and other large-scale installation work. But she got to that point in a roundabout way.

After graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design, she went to taxidermy school. She was working in a taxidermy studio in Reno, Nevada, when she discovered that “there is an entire industry that specifically fabricates museum exhibits. And I was like, ‘oh, that’s where I want to be.’”

Well, almost. After living her whole life in cities, “I’d always been curious about living in a small community” and had been keeping her eyes peeled for communities “that felt like unique pockets in the country, and this one was always at the top of the list.” She moved to Wallowa County in 2016.

The idea of Haunt Camp, she said, almost started as a joke.

I thought, ‘Wouldn’t this be the funniest idea if we could give a bunch of resources to teenagers and let them go wild with Halloween? … If you just put this in the hands of teens, what would they do with it?'”

She mentioned the idea to a friend in San Diego who works in arts education, and he was enthusiastic: “That’s a great idea,” he told her. “There’s (grant) money for that. Go find it.”

The first year of Haunt Camp involved Rymut teaching a molding and casting course in which she showed students the methods for creating silicone prosthetic makeup in much the same way that moviemakers do. Expanding the project to full-bore haunted houses was a natural next step.

Rymut hopes the entire Haunt Camp program shows students that there are careers in the fine arts beyond acting or writing.

When she started Haunt Camp, she said, “I was dreaming about this program. … What can I give to the community? How can I be involved with the teens? … I can show them this very interesting and lucrative career path that they might not know exists that’s in the arts. … This is a very unique thing that I can give and it’s in a place where kids don’t have opportunities like this.”

The “Spooky Story Slam” begins at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 25 at Cloverleaf Hall, 600 NW First St. in Enterprise. The event is free.