Minutes before the ghost train chugs through the woods, Beth Lee, equipped with only a two-way radio, walks down the tracks into inky darkness to check on three wraiths.
The wraiths are spotted on a hill past a graveyard, taking selfies of their pasty faces and fangy-pouts with their phone cameras. Lee, the stage manager for the student actors of the Stanley Park Halloween Ghost Train, reminds them to make use of their flowing gowns and the girls started lifting their arms and spinning in their ragged and torn dresses.
Dracula swoops in from behind his theatre of the dead and says hello to his three undead brides but Lee is his focus: only she has tips on how to remove white grease paint smudges from his slacks. Lee suggests make-up remover. The scent of a human with answers must’ve been pungent, as evidenced by a werewolf stomping out of the dense woods minutes later to ask Lee if his furry boots looked OK tucked into his pants.
“This is not some cheesy train ride through the park,” says Lee, while continuing her check-points down the track. “The ideas for the Ghost Train are not commercial, and not straight-out-of-the box.”
Vancouver performance group Mortal Coil has been responsible for October’s moving theatre in the park since 2000 with many of the professional performers partaking since the beginning. The ideas come from the — read the following word quietly in the event of nearby zombies — brains of the group’s artistic directors Sharon Bayly and Peter Hall.
This year’s theme is Classic Monster Mash-Up, while past themes included scary Shakespeare, cabaret of the underworld, devils from around the world, and Hollywood B-movies.
“We search for new ideas every year without just doing witches, goblins, pumpkins and ghosts,” said Bayly, “And we thought, OK, we’ve never done the classic horror movies that are associated with Halloween. We’re really inspired by the earlier films, we like that aesthetic opposed to the more commercialized images.”
Part of the art of scaring children is the art of performing at nighttime, in the woods. Raccoons have been known to raid the performers’ warming huts where they stay in between trains (one wily four-legged scoundrel opened a Rubbermaid bin, then opened a backpack inside the bin, and stole somebody’s sandwiches). One time a performer fell into the pond (and kept performing, according to Lee).
Windermere secondary student Mikaela Haeusser is thankful to be working above ground as Igor’s gravedigger after her coffin broke last Halloween — with her inside.
“It’s a hardy, hardy group of performers,” says Lee. “They have to be ready for all sorts of weather and a lot of them have been doing this for years. They’ve become like a family.”
Like family, they have fond stories to tell in between sneaking up on fellow performers during downtime and scaring the hell out of them. There’s a goblin who brought a guitar to play throughout the night; and Carmen Rosen, one of the founders of Mortal Coil, used to sing opera in between her performances.
“The park would be dead silent, it was incredible,” says Dracula.
Adds Lee: “There are all these lovely in-between moments.”
As the last matinee train rolls through, Lee and the performers speak in whispers behind trees to outline last-minute aspects of their minute-long shows (cardinal rule: perform until the train is out of sight) and the first of the night trains chugs on by.
Phantom of the Opera, a.k.a. Bonnie Davis, rushes at the train from a chandelier-lit road from an enormous organ set up in the middle of a field, rewarded by screeches from the audience. “Yes,” she says, “I have traumatized some children already.”
The Stanley Park Halloween Ghost Train runs until Nov. 2 every day from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Matinees are every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
