Grim Acres ends long, spook-tacular run

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This article was published 26/09/2022 (1245 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEAR KEMNAY — The team behind Grim Acres Scare Away Cancer used this past weekend to sell off their remaining inventory, having announced late last month that the popular Halloween attraction is ceasing operation.

This closeout yard sale took place outside the Kemnay-area home of Grim Acres owners Brian and Amber Sutherland, who have been putting together an ever-expanding Halloween haunt and maze on their property almost every year since 2010.

Throughout that time, the event had attracted attendees from all over the province, some of whom returned to the Grim Acres grounds Saturday and Sunday to give the couple’s massive collection of spooky props, costumes and decorations a proper home.

“We had people come from as far away as Notre Dame [de Lourdes], we had people from Winnipeg, we’ve had people from Deloraine,” Brian Sutherland told the Sun on Sunday afternoon.

“There’s been some people from professional haunts who were lining up at the doors as early as six o’clock.”

While reconnecting with past Grim Acres attendees and volunteers was a thrill for Sutherland, he also admitted that talking to them this past weekend really hammered home how much this event will be missed in Westman.

“It’s just been such a vital piece of people’s lives for the better part of the last decade,” he said. “So I feel a lot of guilt for what’s having to transpire, having to shut down.”

Sutherland previously told the Sun that, in the past 12 years, his team managed to raise more than $130,000 for the Canadian Cancer Society, even after having to shut down for a time due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, the financial and physical strain of putting together this attraction over time eventually crept up on the Sutherlands, forcing them to make the difficult decision to shut everything down.

“I am getting a little bit older and my body’s not quite what it used to be, so it has taken a physical as well as a mental toll on me,” Sutherland said on Sunday.

“Even with what happened over COVID, it put me in a lot of dark places and I had to accept that fact and just determine what I could do and could not do.”

While Grim Acres won’t be moving forward, Sutherland is still committed to organizing events in the future to help raise money for charity.

Outside of continuing his philanthropic work alongside the Superheroes Against Cancer Alliance group, Sutherland is also eager to put together smaller Halloween-themed events in Brandon, having already field-tested these get-togethers the year before COVID emerged.

“And that was great because a lot of people came out, they dressed up, they had a chance to wear their costumes,” he said. “So we’re going to do things like that again.”

While Sutherland is sad to see Grim Acres go, he remains optimistic about the future of large-scale, Halloween-themed events in Westman more broadly.

In fact, all the remaining inventory that was left over from this past weekend will be donated to local haunts that are trying to gain a foothold in the region, including a new event that’s supposed to debut in the Rivers area this fall.

“We’re really excited about that one because we see such great potential within Westman communities,” he said. “And Rivers, we think that could become the next Grim Acres.”

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @KyleDarbyson