Every October for the past several years, a patch of woods on North Mesa has been quietly converted into something considerably less quiet. The Haunted Trail at Pueblo Canyon Inn, at 199 San Ildefonso Road in Los Alamos, returns on Friday, Oct. 23, 2026, from 7 to 9 p.m. It is free, it is outdoors, and it is put on by local teenagers who spend their October evenings stringing up scenes in the trees.
The event began, as these things often do, much smaller than it is now. In 2020, Matthew Allen, who owns the inn with his family, put together a modest haunted walk for his own kids and their friends. Word got around. By the following Halloween, more than 200 children had shown up at the property, and the family decided it was worth doing again.
"Last year, we put together a small, haunted walk for our kids and their friends," Allen said at the time. "Word of mouth spread and over 200 kids showed up. It was so much fun, we wanted to do it again this year."
In those early years the trail was very much a family production. Allen's three children, then 12, 9 and 6, helped build and staff it, and he described the goal as "a fun event for kids all ages," noting that even teenagers had come the year before and enjoyed themselves. The walk was designed to take roughly five to seven minutes, one-way, with a shorter and gentler route available for children who wanted the atmosphere without the frights.
What has changed since is who is doing the haunting. By 2024, the inn was describing the attraction as the work of local teens who had "transformed a forest path into a free, spine-chilling adventure," with attendees winding "through eerie scenes and startling surprises." That year, children could also choose their own adventure for a less scary or scarier experience.
That structure has held for 2026. The free trail is hosted by Pueblo Canyon Inn and run by local teenagers, who have again built a walk through the woods on the property. The scare-or-no-scare choice remains part of the appeal, letting a six-year-old and a thirteen-year-old walk the same path and have genuinely different experiences of it.
The setting does a lot of the work. Pueblo Canyon Inn sits on a wooded parcel a third of a mile from the roundabout on North Mesa, four miles from Los Alamos National Laboratory and downtown, with gardens, a treehouse, chickens and a putting green on the grounds. It is a bed and breakfast that runs five rooms in the main house, a two-bedroom guest house and a round studio cabin, and much of the year it is a quiet place for people visiting the lab, Bandelier National Monument or the Valles Caldera. For two hours in October, the trees behind it become something else entirely.
There is a particular pleasure in the fact that this is not a commercial haunt with a ticket booth and a parking concession. It is a neighborhood thing that got out of hand in the best way, the kind of event that exists because one family decided to do something for their kids and then kept saying yes when more people asked to come. The teenagers who build it now were, not long ago, the children walking through it.
For anyone planning to go: the trail is free and open to the community, no tickets required. It runs Friday, Oct. 23, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Pueblo Canyon Inn, 199 San Ildefonso Road, Los Alamos. Questions can go to the inn directly. Wear shoes you can walk a forest path in, bring a flashlight if you like, and decide at the entrance whether you want the jump scares or the version without them.