Halloween happenings: Leave Only Footprints by Annex Theatre

What waits for you in the woods? “Leave Only Footprints” is an immersive and haunted experience set in a cursed Pacific Northwest state park along the Salish Sea, where a lone hiker has gone missing. As explorers explore the mysterious forest, they encounter its inhuman inhabitants and uncover the mystery of the hiker’s disappearance. 

This wonderful experience is brought to us by Annex Theatre. It is available for $10 or a Pay What You Can (PWYC); they also have a group discount opportunity. Visitors can arrive on time or up to 20 minutes later than the scheduled time. 

The experience starts at the entrance of the theater, where visitors are greeted by a park steward/ranger who checks them in and explains their role in this fun, thrilling hiking trail. It is the story of Hollow Hope State Park, which is written in detail in the pamphlets handed out upon entrance.

As visitors enter the park, they encounter actors portraying a witch, a siren, a lost traveler, a ghost, and a bat. Then, they have to converse with these characters in order to get the correct clue to continue with their adventure. Most often, many visitors get lost and mix up the order, but they always figure out the right clue and find their way out.

The experience is a jigsaw puzzle, an escape room, and a treasure hunt wrapped up into one. Annex Theatre has done an amazing job with this immersive and haunted experience. The only criticism is that it does not run long enough. Even though it ran from Oct. 3 to 31, it wasn’t long enough, as I personally would love to go for it again. They went all out with the experience, and it was absolutely worth it.

The costumes were spectacular, the set was built to absolute perfection right down to sea moss and sea shells, and the props were in perfect condition and worked the way they were supposed to. The plot and clues aligned perfectly well, but one thing that was absolutely commendable was the acting. It is undoubtedly hard to perform in front of a live audience, but staying in character while you are approached by a clueless audience asking you ridiculous questions over and over again is even more challenging. The actors did an amazing job and didn’t break character even once.

Who was behind this amazing new outlook on a haunted house? It was organized by Emily Pike and Emily Sershon. “Leave Only Footprints” started as a simple “haunted house” slotted into just two weeks in October. Pike was excited about it even before the season selection process in the spring, so it was always going to be an immersive experience. However, due to a scheduling conflict with the show, which was originally scheduled for September, “Leave Only Footprints” expanded from a modest haunted house to a fully-produced, ambitious, multi-faceted project over the summer. They modeled it partially off of a previous Annex production called “Ghosty,” which had individual interconnected installations and invited the audience to solve a little mystery to appease each ghost. Pike also added the idea of the journal entries, written by Drew David Combs, was part of their vision from the start. As a scenic designer, Sershon’s approach was more about the atmospheric experience. They came at it from different perspectives but shared an overall vision. “We wanted to go big so that we could offer exciting opportunities to as many artists as possible and get new faces in the theater. We are overwhelmed with joy and gratitude for all the folks that jumped into this project with us and for everyone who came to see it,” stated Pike.

They proposed the original haunted house idea during the season selection in May but didn’t start on “Leave Only Footprints” until late June, and the first designer meeting wasn’t until Aug. 4. While they had some Annex company members on board early, they didn’t finish casting until almost mid-September. They built all the installations in less than three weeks. It came together extremely quickly for how big of a project it was. “We have an amazing marketing manager who got the ball rolling early, and I clearly remember being in a completely empty theater three weeks before opening when people were already buying tickets and thinking, ‘wow, we have a lot to do,’ we were lucky to have such a talented, collaborative team and tons of volunteer help to pull it off,” shared Sershon.

It was undoubtedly a huge undertaking to transform the whole space and develop the show relatively quickly, hence the fact they needed a big team. There were 44 people credited on the program, plus another 30 or so.

“We were eager to pull out all the stops, in large part because we were so motivated by a desire to help solidify Annex’s artistic company and widen our audience,” said Pike.

“It’s not like any process on any project I’ve ever worked on, but it has been gratifying not only to get to work with so many talented and passionate artists, but the individual contributions of these artists have developed our initial idea in ways we couldn’t have predicted,” added Sershon. 

“For ‘Leave Only Footprints,’ we knew the piece would be set in a state park, so we gathered a huge team of scenic designers and started defining the shape of the world. From there, we worked our way inward by defining the character archetypes that would inhabit each environment, the problems they’d need help solving, and we incorporated the premise of the missing hiker to sort of tie the whole thing together,” concluded Pike.

How this amazing team of 44 managed to pull this off in such a short time is nothing short of a miracle.

The experience was amazing. I’m hoping Annex Theatre will come up with more amazing experiences in the future, as they seem to be off to a great start. This was a new, unexpected twist to Halloween for those bored of haunted houses, so no wonder it was sold out. It is honestly one of the best ways to spend 75 minutes in Seattle this Halloween.