This is Halloween (40 photos)

Although it was a rainy Halloween local charity events, bars, streets, and shopping areas filled up with costumed people over the Halloween weekend in Sault Ste. Marie.

Local-area high school students crazily yelled and ran around the MS Norgoma as costumed actors in an annual haunted tour that raised money for charities and food for the Soup Kitchen Community Centre and St. Vincent Place.

Over the 12 days, 3624 people walked the haunted tour while $5,846.15 in funds and about four van loads of non-perishable food items were raised.

Monetary proceeds are to be divided up between Algoma Residential Community Hospice’s palliative care and paediatric divisions, Children’s Rehabilitation Centre Algoma, and to the ship’s restoration.

At the Royal Canadian Legion, sisters Lynne Holmberg and Carole Smith put on a Halloween party and raised $1,200 to be used to buy toys for the Christmas Cheer Stuff-A-Bus.  

Rock band Coverfly hosted a Halloween party at the Croatian Hall and raised over $800 for Alexandra Lesage, a local area girl who was paralyzed in a car accident in October.

Instead of a 50/50 draw, the event had a 70/10/10/10 draw.

Seventy percent of the funds from the draw were donated to Lesage’s cause while three different prize winners each won 10 percent.

“If you win too much at a benefit you feel obligated to give it back (and) this way we said you can just keep it,” said Delorenzi.

Coverfly also wanted to thank former Sault Ste. Marie Greyhound Colin Miller for getting his current team, the Boston Bruins, to sign and donate a Bruins baseball hat to Lesage’s cause.

Perhaps the most creative costumes in town were found at local bar Loplops’ Halloween Party.  

Paul Bichler dressed up as Achilles wearing a 30-lb steel helmet that was used, and quite possibly worn by Brad Pitt, in the movie Troy.

Bichler picked up the helmet when he was living in Asia a few years ago.

Melissa Slobodecki saw a headless woman costume on Pinterest and decided to make her own this year.

Loplops also had an Edward Scissor Hands, a Thor, a Kurt Cobain and an elaborate Zombie Bride in attendance.

The Moose Lodge had perhaps the most mixed age party in town as people in their 80s and 90s ripped up the dance floor while young 20-somethings sat watching jealously from their tables.

Top Hat Billiards hosted what their facebook page writes was “THE BIGGEST HALLOWE'EN PARTY IN THE SOO!”

There was a long lineup to get into the bar and notable costumes were Doomsday prophets wearing real Israeli nuclear fallout gear, Slender Man, and a power transformer.

Costumes were also spotted on the Friday before Halloween at a Freak Show Halloween event hosted by Cabin Media at the Machine Shop at Mill Square.

Seasonal costume shop Spirit Halloween gave (at a heavily discounted price) a smoke machine and other props to the MS Norgoma haunted tour and will be having a post-Halloween sale on November 1 and 2 where everything in the store is half price.

(PHOTO: Deborah Armstrong at the Station Mall on Halloween Day 2015. “I don’t know (what I am dressed as), I just kind of did whatever,” said Armstrong. Photo by Jeff Klassen)