For one night this fall, a stretch of trail in Hiawatha Highlands will be handed over to whatever lives in the dark corners of your imagination. Haunted Hikes, the Halloween-season walk staged by Sault Ste. Marie-area outfitter Forest the Canoe, returns on October 30, 2026, for a single evening, and this year it moves to a new route starting from the Pinder parking lot.
The format is simple and, for anyone who has done the usual haunted-house circuit, deliberately different. Participants walk a two-kilometre trail through the woods after dark. There are no walls, no queue-line animatronics, no roof. This year's theme is "Nightmares," which the organizers describe as an excavation of "the strange, unsettling and downright creepy things that live in the dark corners of your imagination" — and then, as they put it, putting them somewhere you definitely didn't want to find them. The event listing promises creepy characters, unexpected encounters, things lurking in the woods and, in its own words, "plenty of reasons to question why you agreed to go for a walk at night."
It is not a family outing. Everyone on the trail must be 16 or older, and a waiver has to be completed before departure. Tickets run $25 per person plus tax, general admission, and the organizers note a seven-day cancellation policy that refunds the ticket price less a 5 per cent processing fee, or $1.25 per ticket. Because it is a nighttime hike rather than a staged attraction, the practical advice is unusually earnest for a Halloween event: dress for the weather, wear proper walking or hiking shoes, and bring a flashlight or headlamp for the walk to and from the trailhead. The event goes ahead in rain, snow or cold. Only thunder and lightning will stop it, in which case it is postponed or cancelled for safety.
What makes this year notable is what comes after it. Forest the Canoe is keeping Haunted Hikes to a single night in 2026 while the company works on "building something bigger for 2027," according to the event listing. That makes this a transitional year — a smaller, one-night version of a production the organizers clearly intend to expand.
The event is the work of Forest the Canoe, a Goulais River-based outfitter run by life partners Shana Shipperbottom and Ryan Walker. The two founded the business in 2020, according to Northern Ontario Business, with the stated goal of living "a more nature-based lifestyle" and sharing their love of the outdoors. Both are trained interpretive guides and experienced backcountry campers, and both came to the venture from careers in social services and adult education — backgrounds that show in the way the company frames its tours as interpretation and education rather than pure thrill-seeking. Forest the Canoe's core business is paddling and hiking: canoe, kayak and stand-up paddleboard rentals, guided camping trips, snowshoe tours, glamping and shuttles along the eastern shore of Lake Superior, from Sault Ste. Marie up to Lake Superior Provincial Park. The Halloween hike is an outlier in that catalogue, but not an arbitrary one: it applies the same guided-trail format to a fictional landscape instead of a natural one.
The company has also spent recent years trying to remove the barriers that keep locals and visitors off Northern Ontario trails. Working with Sault Tourism, Walker and Shipperbottom identified transportation as the top obstacle — "Being in Northern Ontario, the drive is a big barrier," Walker told Northern Ontario Business — and launched the True North Adventure Bus, which picks guests up from local hotels and carries them to guided excursions up Highway 17, with support from the Tourism Development Fund. The bus tours, capped at about 10 guests each, ran on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in late summer and early fall. The same instinct — get people out of town and onto a trail they might not otherwise reach — underpins the haunted hike, which is staged at a conservation area rather than in a city venue.
Hiawatha Highlands, the setting, is one of the region's best-known four-season trail networks, home to Crystal Falls, the Pinder Trail, Wishart Park and a stretch of the Voyageur Trail, with routes ranging from short walks to much longer outings. The Pinder trail system and its parking area sit off Landslide Road, and the highlands are widely described as the crown jewels of hiking around Sault Ste. Marie. In daylight it is a place for waterfalls and lookouts. On October 30 it becomes something else entirely.
Previous editions of Haunted Hikes have leaned on distinct themes rather than repeating a formula. One earlier version, "Curse of the Clowns," sent participants down a two-kilometre dark trail where sinister clowns lurked in the shadows and, as the description put it, unsettling encounters and scares awaited "at every turn." Another, "Backwoods," populated the trail with strange sounds, flickering lights and twisted figures hiding among the trees as hikers moved deeper into the creatures' territory. The 2025 edition, promoted through Algoma University's events calendar, framed the walk around rituals and conjuring, ran 1.5 hours, and offered bus pickup from the university with headlamps provided. The through-line across all of them is the same: a real forest, a real trail, and performers placed inside it, so that the scare comes from not being entirely sure what is a tree and what is not.
The 2026 edition's move to a new trail is part of the pitch. "New year. New trail. New nightmares," the listing reads. For anyone who has walked a previous version, the geography itself will be unfamiliar — which is, presumably, the point.
For all the theatrical language, the organizers are candid about the limits of the enterprise. They cannot promise good weather; they can only ask for good judgment. The trail is two kilometres, the night is one, and the whole thing is over almost as soon as it begins. "One night. One new trail. One very bad night's sleep," the listing concludes. Given that the next edition is being built up as something larger, this may be the last chance to see Haunted Hikes in its current, comparatively modest form.