MOSES LAKE — The members of Nightscare Productions are still providing Halloween activities for Grant County residents.

The group is replacing its haunted house with a Halloween Carnival from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Halloween at the Moses Lake Swap Meet, located at 4619 Stratford Road. The event is free to enter. Individual activities may cost money. Shane Morlan, Nightscare’s president, explained the group wasn’t able to hold its normal haunted house at the Grant County Fairgrounds after a rent increase, and couldn’t find another place to hold the event, so they chose a Halloween Carnival.

“I got the idea from thinking back to when I was in elementary school, and we used to go to the gym on Halloween, and do all the activities there, so I’m setting it up similar where we have different activity areas for children and adults.”

The group will lend its roughly 15 years of experience in doing makeup for the haunted house to doing makeup for people at the carnival, Morlan said. The cost is $5 for children and $10 for adults.

“If you go to Walmart or Rite Aid, you get a makeup kit for $5. It comes with three colors and you can make yourself a basic zombie or a witch or something,” he said. “We have a lot more tools at our disposal to where we can be much more creative and in depth with our makeup process and we can make some really, really interesting things.”

People can have their photo taken with a character of their choice, Morlan said. They are selling caramel apples and a costume contest.

“Then on Halloween we’ll be doing indoor trick-or-treating as well,” he said. “So they can go from vendor to vendor, stall to stall, in there, and we’ll have candy to hand out to the kids, so they can get a lot of candy in one small area, and not have to walk around the neighborhoods and fight traffic.”

The group is going to involve as many participants as it can in the carnival, Morlan said. His three children are bringing friends to participate, along with children who participated in past haunted houses.

“Even though we can’t run a physical haunted house this year, we still want to give that experience to the people,” he said. “We don’t want to take that away from them, so we are going to have people in costume and in character, more importantly, walking around and giving good scares.”

Since the participants don’t have to play a character for a particular set, they have more choice in what they can be, Morlan said.

“A lot of people are really excited to bring out characters that they haven’t been able to do before, and act as those characters and pose for pictures as those characters as well,” he said.

The money the group makes from the event go to area food banks, Morlan said.

“We used to go strictly to the Moses Lake Food Bank, but we were fortunate enough to be successful in the past couple years where we had more money that we could spread it out to other area food banks as well, Royal City Food Bank, Othello Food Bank, some of the food banks that don’t get as much,” he said.

If they have money, the group adopts families on Christmas and Thanksgiving, Morlan said. “People who are in need, or less fortunate, we want to make sure they have an awesome holiday experience too,” he said.

The group hopes to find a place to have a haunted house next year, and is planning other events for the year, Morlan said. They are hoping to hold a murder mystery dinner, a zombie walk and other items in 2013.

“We want to keep the organization active and we want to do stuff to keep the children involved,” he said. “We have a whole list of stuff that we’ve never done before that we’re hoping to do this year.”

For more information contact Morlan at 509-855-8271.