On Halloween weekend in 2022, Wallowa County residents lined up to enter the “Cheesecake Laboratory,” a haunted spoof of a Cheesecake Factory restaurant. Inside, attendees faced costume-clad Wallowa County teens as they passed through a mad scientist’s lab, monster-filled bathrooms, and a 50-foot cake cave ending with a hulking cheesecake monster dubbed “Mother Cheese.” The entire production was created by local teens for Haunt Camp, an Enterprise-based program where teenagers, under the guidance of professional fabricator JR Rymut, design and build a haunted house.

Now in its fourth year, Haunt Camp is held in Enterprise and offers a free, hands-on experience for participants ages 13 to 21. Starting in August, teens meet four times a week to brainstorm, design, and construct their unique, avant-garde haunted house. The project culminates over Halloween weekend, when the haunted house opens to the public. Rymut calls the production an “art prank.” “We are so much more concerned about making it funny first than we are making it horrifying first,” she explains.

Haunt Camp is more than just funny and spooky, though. Rymut says Haunt Camp provides kids with an important artistic outlet in a rural community where such opportunities are scarce. By fostering creativity and collaboration, arts education is shown to enhance social and emotional development, foster civic engagement, and strengthen community connections. This is why the program has drawn praise and attention beyond Wallowa County, including funding from Oregon Community Foundation.

For Rymut, creating and running Haunt Camp has been a labor of love. A skilled fabricator, she has worked in various cities across the U.S., designing and constructing props, scenery, and art exhibits. Fabricators do everything from metalwork to carpentry, to molding and casting. “If you think of a museum or a film set…anything within those environments has been built by somebody,” she explains.

Rymut first encountered Enterprise while on a bike tour years ago. “I got this impression that it was pretty different from a lot of rural towns in America,” Rymut says. In 2016, she took the leap and moved to Enterprise. Once there, she initially focused on her personal fabrication work but soon realized she wanted to engage more deeply with her community. She thought up Haunt Camp as a way to share her fabrication skills with young people. “I thought, this is the most intrinsic thing to myself that I can bring here,” Rymut says. Shortly after conceiving of the idea, Rymut says, Haunt Camp “just took over my life.”

Pulling off the first few years was a scramble. “I have footage from last year of volunteers working at the 11th hour,” Rymut says. “We’re trying to get this haunted house built, and it’s snowing outside.” The challenge wasn’t just the complex quality of the production itself; finding reliable grant funding was also tough.

This year was the first year that Rymut went into Haunt Camp with a sense of security, thanks in part to Oregon Community Foundation. In 2023, OCF named Haunt Camp as one of 14 projects to receive a Creative Heights Grant, an initiative to invest a total of $1 million in arts and culture projects across Oregon. “The Creative Heights Grant was such an honor,” says Rymut. “Having that certainty and that stability was totally life-changing.”

Rymut saw the grant as especially meaningful and validating in the way that it values bold art and respects artists. “I was really wowed by their parameters and their principles,” says Rymut, referencing OCF Creative Heights Grant’s requirement to demonstrate that artists will be paid living wages, and the requirement to quantify the impact of the work, among other things. “It was the only funding opportunity that I felt wasn’t adversarial to the creative process. It was a major honor that my program was chosen.”

A vibrant arts scene fosters a sense of belonging, amplifies marginalized voices, and builds connections within communities. Research shows that thriving arts and culture scenes can also significantly enhance a community’s learning, physical health, and mental well-being. One 2017 study in New York City by the University of Pennsylvania found that the presence of creative nonprofits, entertainment venues, and other arts in low-income neighborhoods led to decreases in serious crime, lower rates of child abuse, and higher test scores.

Thriving creative arts can also drive economic growth, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Across Oregon, the arts and culture sector generates $9.5 billion and supports over 61,000 jobs, particularly in urban areas, according to Oregon Community Foundation’s “Tracking Oregon’s Progress” report. However, JR Rymut notes that in smaller areas like Wallowa County, opportunities for the arts can be limited. In Wallowa County, there is Fishtrap, a center for literary arts, and the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture, which is Haunt Camp’s fiscal sponsor. However, for youth in Wallowa County, Rymut says there’s a lack of extracurricular creative programming. “There’s not a ton of offerings beyond sports and youth groups.”

Youth arts education significantly improves development, both cognitive and noncognitive according to the American Enterprise Institute. That’s why Haunt Camp aims to offer a place where Wallowa County teens can meet new people and be their authentic self. Each year, Haunt Camp has students from three different Wallowa County high schools and one alternative education program. The benefits of having an accepting, creative space like Haunt Camp are clear to Rymut. “Some of these kids come here, and they just need an accepting place. They need a place where they can relax. They need a place where they can feel seen around their peers if that’s not the situation in their school or their home.”

Haunt Camp also allows students to envision a career in the arts. Be it fabrication, performance, or other creative arts, students are learning relevant technical skills that can be used in well-paying creative jobs. Rymut works with adult volunteers and a couple of paid instructors. She was able to fund those positions with the help of Oregon Community Foundation’s Creative Heights Grant.

While students do have creative opportunities in school, like band and theater, Haunt Camp gives them a unique opportunity to generate their own creative work. They generate a fully original theater production about whatever they are passionate about. “Kids having artistic authority over something… I think it’s really rare, especially on this scale,” says Rymut. The scale of the project is indeed huge. The students work in a studio space made up of various shipping containers and a large gravel lot. Previous year’s projects reached all the way to the ceiling. Rymut says this experience can be really special for some students. “I’ve heard from a bunch of them who are working on a whole huge mural: ‘I’ve never worked on art that’s bigger than me.'”

One of the things that makes Haunt Camp really special is that the students are the designers and also the “bosses.” “My teens, like they’re the clients; they’re the people that I’m working for.” The teens generate the ideas, execute the production, and make the creative decisions. When she works with the students, Rymut considers herself just a “grunt on the production floor.” Basically, she’s there to make the students’ visions come to life. It’s a mindset that I think is really funny. I just like when kids get to boss adults around a little bit.”

Rymut is amazed that Haunt Camp has gotten the support it does. “It feels like I am getting away with something when I am running Haunt Camp,” she says. Rymut has bold visions for the future growth of the program. For next year, the hope is that the show will go on as planned and will be even more textured, interesting, professional, and scary than before.