by James Careless
Imagine a 175-year-old British stone fort haunted by ghosts and goblins. In the parade square, a winged skeleton prepares to fly away, a rotting human torso clenched in its bony fingers. Inside the bunkhouse, the beds are filled with long-dead soldiers in poor states of ... “preservation.” All these atrocities and more are bathed in blood-red light, as screams echo off the fort’s damp stone walls! Boooooooo!!!!!
Welcome to “Fort Fright”—a.k.a the annual Halloween haunted house at historic Fort Henry in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, about 160 miles from Toronto up the coast of Lake Ontario. It is staged in a number of restored rooms in the fort, taking advantage of the period antiques that are already in place.
“We use a mix of animatronics and live actors in ‘Fort Fright,’ which runs from late September up to Halloween,” says Bryan Mercer, Fort Henry’s director of marketing. “This event alone brings in 24,000 visitors a season; almost 20 percent of the fort’s total annual attendance.”
“Fort Fright” is just one of the innovative special events being staged at Fort Henry. It is a prime example of the fort’s foray into new and different attractions.
“When you are a Canada’s Wonderland or a Six Flags Darien Lake, you attract a broad base of the population,” Mercer tells Funworld magazine. “But when you are a historic site like Fort Henry, you appeal to a narrow demographic that likes museums. To boost attendance, you need to think outside the box. That’s what we are doing with ‘Fort Fright.’ As we like to say, Fort Henry is, ‘not your father’s fort.’”
An Unintentional Attraction
In fairness to the British army that built Fort Henry, attracting visitors wasn’t high on the fort’s list. In fact, it was built to deter unwelcome visitors; namely American troops trying to head up the Rideau Canal to Canada’s capital, Ottawa. This canal begins at Lake Ontario. Fort Henry was specifically built nearby to protect the canal, just 20 years after the American-Canadian War of 1812.
 Fort Henry is made of thick, strong limestone. Situated on the highest point of Kingston’s waterfront, it was designed to endure naval bombardment from Lake Ontario—and reply in kind with its own array of cannons.
Any troops trying to penetrate the fort’s walls would first have to cross a 40-foot wide and 30-foot-deep dry ditch that encircles the structure. Chances are they would not have made it: There are more than 300 rifle “loopholes” in the walls. These allow the defenders to take potshots at the invaders, while remaining protected themselves.
At the time, these and other advanced features made Fort Henry a state-of-the-art defensive position. (In modern funds, it cost $35 million to build.) As for whether it would be sufficient to repel U.S. invaders? Since Canada and the U.S. have been at peace since the War of 1812, we’ll never know.
As the years passed, Fort Henry’s importance declined. In 1870 the British Army left Canada and turned the site over to the Canadian militia, which abandoned it in 1891. Except for being used as a prisoner-of-war camp in World War I, the fort was allowed to deteriorate.
It was the Great Depression, ironically, that motivated the Canadian government to restore Fort Henry as a make-work project. The project was overseen by Kingston’s Ron Way, who became Fort Henry’s first director when it opened to the public in 1938.
“It was Way who created the Fort Henry Guard; the authentically uniformed student guides who perform here during the summer,” says Mercer. “This was a tremendous achievement, considering that there was no real money to pay for this project. But Way believed that having guides dressed as 19th century British soldiers—and training them to fire the fort’s cannons and rifles using blanks—would bring the fort’s history to life.”
Way stayed with Fort Henry through 1958, when the site was transferred to the St. Lawrence Parks Commission. He remained passionate about the fort until his death in 1978.
For many years, Fort Henry was fully funded by the Ontario government, with no pressure to earn any significant revenues. But times changed: As government spent more on health care and education, provincially owned attractions such as Fort Henry were compelled to generate a share of their operating revenues.
Now the fort was doing reasonably well by museum attendance standards, thanks to the military battles and cannon firings staged by the uniformed guides. But the newfound need to make money meant the old ways of doing business had to be changed. Somehow, Fort Henry would have to attract a wider audience—going beyond history buffs who enjoy the cannons’ thundering roar during the fort’s “World Heritage Sunset Ceremony.”
 “To achieve this goal, we developed a whole program of special events,” says Will Baird, Fort Henry’s director of special events, promotion, and sponsorship. “Our goal was to give people who might otherwise not come a reason to visit Fort Henry. Once here, we also hoped they’d be sufficiently impressed to visit the fort afterward for its own sake.”
“Fort Fright” is one such special event. So are guided ghost tours. They are held on the fort’s grounds at night, underpinned by the hanging of Nils Von Schoultz, a Polish-born revolutionary, on Dec. 8, 1838.
The background: Canada had just undergone two unsuccessful rebellions in 1837. In response, Von Schoultz led a group of American rebellion sympathizers to capture a stone windmill beside Lake Ontario. (The U.S. military and government were not involved in this raid.) He hoped the 80-foot-tall, stonewalled windmill would form a fortified rallying point for Canadian rebels to overthrow the British. But Von Schoultz’s hopes were in vain: After four days of fighting with British and Canadian troops in which 48 men died, the Americans surrendered.
“Von Schoulz was eventually hanged here at Fort Henry,” says Baird. “Before he died, he promised to haunt the British who had hung him for the rest of their lives. That story really adds substance to our ghost tours and gives us something tangible to work with.”
That’s not all: During the summer, Fort Henry hosts the Kingston Symphony Orchestra (KSO) in an outdoor performance. The KSO performs the 1812 Overture, accompanied by the fort’s own rifles and cannons. The fort has also been the site of concerts by country star Dwight Yoakam and rock band The Tragically Hip.
In a historic irony, the U.S. Marine Corps visits biannually to march alongside the fort’s own troops inside the very walls that were built to keep American troops outside. Such events are aimed at attracting U.S. tourists. Says Mercer, “We often joke and say that Fort Henry was built to keep the Americans away—now we spend millions to get them to come!”
Then there are one-off attractions like the North American Police Equestrian Championships, where the fort’s parade grounds were transformed into a giant horse paddock. “This required countless number of pickup trucks loaded with sandbags,” says Baird. “We couldn’t bring the sand in using dump trucks, because they were too tall to get through the fort’s main gate.”
The small gate—it was built for 1830s-vintage horsedrawn wagons, after all—is just one of the physical limits of Fort Henry. Running water was piped in during the 1930s, and power is brought in using ground-level wires. But the need to preserve the fort as a historic site means modern amenities are at a minimum, and making actual physical changes to the core structure is not allowed.
“As a result, our exhibits are largely freestanding and temporary,” Mercer says. “Since the fort is a UNESCO World Heritage site, we have to minimize our impact on the structure.”
Meanwhile, Fort Henry’s location on windy Lake Ontario and the constant freeze/thaw cycles of winter play havoc with the mortar that holds its limestone in place. As a result, the fort is currently in the midst of a 10-year multimillion-dollar restoration project.
Add rentals for private parties and functions, educational sleepovers, and weddings, and Fort Henry plays host to 150- 200 special events annually. The money it brings in helps keep this living museum fully manned by the Fort Henry Guard—about 100 in all—and the site properly maintained.
Frightening Future
 What’s next? Will Baird is thinking big. “We are going to be adding ‘Laser Zombie Tag’ to ‘Fort Fright,’ where visitors will use handheld laser guns to shoot zombie soldiers,” he says. “We also want to add a winter snow-tubing run to our hill. It is already popular for free tobogganing. If we add groomed tube tracks, we will definitely attract paying customers.”
As well, Fort Henry is considering adding Segways, which “would allow visitors to cover longer distances and enable us to show areas of the fort that are currently unseen,” Mercer notes. Using new technology will also make Fort Henry “more relevant to the emerging demographic.”
In total, Fort Henry’s innovative special events have brought its annual attendance up to 130,000 visitors a year. “We will never lose sight of our core attraction,” Mercer promises. “But all these special events really do help bring in more people—and provide much-needed funds to keep Fort Henry alive for the future.”
You can visit Fort Henry online at www.forthenry.com.
James Careless is an experienced freelance writer with credits at Business Week, NBC News, and NPR. Despite claims to the contrary, he does not yelp like a terrified beagle on roller coasters unless they are very fast.
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