Three miles south of Humboldt, just off Highway 20, sits a cluster of buildings that spends most of the year devoted to the careful preservation of the past. The Humboldt and Area Vintage Club, established in 1995, is a working agricultural museum: tractors from 1927 to 1954, a 1918 steam engine, threshing machines, and the accumulated tools of a century of prairie farming. Every Friday and Saturday through July and August, volunteers open the gates so families can walk among the machinery and remember how the land was worked.
For a few weeks each October, though, the Vintage Club becomes something else entirely. The old buildings, which already carry the creak and shadow of age, are transformed into a grand masquerade ball presided over by a host who calls himself Count Alexander von Humboldt. The Humboldt Festival of Frights, now in its fifth year, has grown into one of the region's most elaborate Halloween productions — a haunted attraction built not by a commercial fright company but by a service club.
The story of how a Lions club ended up running a haunted house begins, oddly enough, with the club not existing at all. For years, Humboldt had gone without a Lions chapter. That changed in the fall of 2023, when a new Humboldt Lions Club was chartered, sponsored by the Lions of Lake Lenore. The charter night was held at St. Augustine Catholic Church in Humboldt on Nov. 4, 2023.
The new club needed projects, and it needed fundraising. What it landed on was a haunted house — and the Festival of Frights was born. The event has run every October since, growing more ambitious with each iteration. In recent years the theme has shifted toward homegrown horror: one edition was billed as "Hell's Half Acre," a haunted experience inspired by true crime events within Saskatchewan. Another carried the subtitle "Farmageddon," leaning into the agricultural setting itself. The 2026 edition returns to the masquerade-ball conceit, with the Count as master of ceremonies.
The name is a wink at the city's own history. Humboldt, Saskatchewan, was named for Baron Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist and explorer born in 1769, whose accounts of his travels through Central and South America left a lasting mark on modern science. The city's namesake was a man of Enlightenment curiosity, cataloguing the natural world; the Festival of Frights has turned him into a gothic host. It is the kind of joke that only works in a place that knows its own history well enough to poke at it.
The setting does much of the work. On a dark October night, the Vintage Club's buildings — barns and sheds built to house threshing machines and steam engines — provide an appropriately eerie backdrop. The attraction makes deliberate use of the building's character and atmosphere, threading visitors through spaces that were never designed to be walked in the dark. The club's collection of antique equipment, dormant for the winter, becomes part of the scenery.
The production is a genuine community effort. Southland Transportation, which operates buses in the Humboldt area, has been a local sponsor, donating a bus to be transformed into part of the haunted attraction, another for member use, and storage space for costumes and props. Donna Schlosser, the company's full-time dispatcher in Humboldt, has volunteered her time and recruited colleagues to act in the event. According to Southland, a full month of evenings and weekend work goes into creating the spectacle each year, and sponsors are invited to preview the attraction and offer feedback before opening night.
That preview has become something of a local tradition in its own right. This year, the Humboldt Broncos — the town's beloved junior hockey team — joined Bolt FM and a handful of brave volunteers for a walk-through before the public was let in. The results, as reported afterward, were mixed in the most entertaining way. Oliver Phillips, experiencing the attraction for the first time, admitted simply that "it was pretty scary." Liam Eisnor, who had haunted-house experience from Winnipeg, was harder to impress. "I thought it was a pretty good experience here, and I didn't really get scared too much," he said. Cody Farrell and Leo Seitz also made the journey through, with Seitz noting that his previous hockey home of Flin Flon does not exactly offer the same kind of haunted-house experience.
For those who would rather admire the craftsmanship than be frightened by it, the festival offers a second, gentler option. A no-scare walk-through gives visitors a chance to tour the attraction with the lights on — a decidedly less terrifying experience that also functions as a behind-the-scenes look at the construction, artistry, and sheer volume of work that goes into producing a haunted house. In other words, it is a chance to find out exactly what terrified you.
The main event runs from 7:30 to 11 p.m. on Oct. 9, 10, 16, 17, 23, 24 and 30. Admission is $20 per person, cash only, and anyone 12 and under must be accompanied by an adult. The no-scare walk-through takes place Nov. 1 from 1 to 3:30 p.m., with admission of $10 per person.
Proceeds from the Humboldt Lions Club's efforts support local causes, including food banks, senior centres, and other community programs — the ordinary, unglamorous work that service clubs do, funded by a few weeks of well-orchestrated fright. Concessions are available on site and support other local organizations as well, so a night at the Festival of Frights spreads its dollars across the community.
There is something fitting about all of it. The Vintage Club exists to keep the past alive — to make sure the tractors and threshing machines and steam engines of another era are not forgotten. For a few nights each October, the Lions Club uses those same buildings to summon something else from the past: a Count, a masquerade, and a long, dark walk through the history of a prairie town that knows exactly who it was named after.