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Trick and treats

Halloween options abound at local haunts

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Halloween parades and festivities will be plentiful this weekend in southern New Jersey.

Photo by: Sharon Stabley

Trick-or-treat, smell my feet .... well, you know the rest. With Halloween conveniently falling on a Saturday, there's still plenty of spooky and not-so-spooky fun for both youngsters and adults.

Promising "fun in the sun" turning into "fear in the dark," a candlelit Ghost Tour of Ocean City mixes historic lore with tales of ghostly hauntings of such sites as the Flanders Hotel, the old Stainton department store and a house inhabited by the descendants of Betsy Ross.

The tour is "very family appropriate," organizer Eileen Reeser says. "If you like ghost stories, you'll love the tour."

Guides, wearing long black robes and carrying lanterns, lead the tour, regaling tour-goers with stories about the spirits that haunt some of the city's oldest buildings. At the Flanders, legend has it a female spirit named Emily, who was married there, still roams the halls.

"Nobody knows why she haunts there," Reeser says. "Some say she's waiting for her husband to return."

The 75-minute tour also visits a realty office that has had a lot of ghostly activity, as well as the old department store where a male presence has been felt. Then there's an alley-way where "a lot of weird, unfortunate circumstances have occurred," Reeser says.

Other details could not be gleaned from Reeser, as our phone connection was mysteriously (perhaps paranormally?) muddled in mid-conversation. For more about the spirits and ghosts who haunt Ocean City, you'll have to check out the ghost tour yourself. If you dare.

The folks at R and J Farm - located at 723 W. Herschel St. in Galloway - have made good use of three generations worth of experience. Bring the whole family or take a class trip and to enjoy hours of fun into the night.

You could start by whiling away an hour or so in the Haunted Corn Maze as you search for guiding clues and run into dead ends. Lost? Never fear, there are "cornfield lifeguards" on hand to help you find your way back. For the truly daring, try the maze after dark with a flashlight. Tickets are $6.

After all that walking - and running from a fright or two - slouch into a bale of hay and enjoy a leisurely hayride through the Pumpkin Patch. Choose your very own pumpkin to carve or make a memorial pie to celebrate your epic victory over the maze. Hayride tickets are $4, while combo tickets for the maze and hayride are $9.

Stick around after dark for a free movie under the stars Friday and Saturday nights. For more info, call 609-593-6180 or go to www.randjfarm.com.

Cape May bills itself as one of the most haunted towns in America. The Emlen Physick Estate, 1048 Washington St, is decked out for the spirited season. Take the Phantoms of the Physick Estate Tour, a self-guided tour featuring spooky sounds, special effects and scary stuff, from to 8:30 p.m., Friday, Oct. 30, and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 31. Admission is $12 for adults and $6 for children ages 3 to 12. Go to

www.capemaymac.org

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