The Red and Black

Issue date: 10/28/03 Section: Variety

Watkinsville is charming and quaint, but the tiny town usually doesn't play host to ghouls and goblins -- or does it?

When: Tonight at 7 Where: Event begins at The Eagle Tavern Admission: $12 for guests 12 years and older, $6 for guests ages 6 to 11. Free for guests under 5.

This Halloween season, Watkinsville's Historical Haunts Tour promises spooky, family-oriented fun, complete with candy and costumes.

The tour, which is held tonight, starts at the Oconee County Courthouse at 7.

Unfortunately, the tour is overly pricey for what it delivers: ostensibly a living commercial for businesses participating in the event.

The first stop, the Eagle Tavern Museum and Welcome Center, is easily the scariest, best-planned and well-prepared portion of the entire tour.

Featuring a trip into the smoky, dirt-floored basement of the building and tours through the old inn's creepy bedrooms, the Eagle Tavern delivers what the tour tries to induce -- real scares.

After the short spook, vans take visitors to the Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation Center, a former one-story school house that's been converted into an art museum.

Complete with macabre artwork, blood splattered walls and the theme from "Psycho" -- or "Re-Animator," depending on who you ask -- the center manages to drudge up a few screams.

Nancy Nusser, a doctorate student from Watkinsville, said the Eagle Tavern and OCAF portions of the tour were "very creative with nice historical anecdotes."

At the end of the OCAF stop, the tour becomes one long, blatant infomercial.

Every stop becomes less terrifying and centers more on pushing colored glass plates, art framing and weekend getaways on the parents of formerly frightened youngsters.

Art Masters, housed in an old cotton warehouse, was the locale most guilty of this indiscretion.

After an obviously hastily prepared attempt at a ghost story centered around the many services the shop offers, the brassy businesswoman who owned the place turned on all the lights and made everyone look at her wares.

The last two pit-stops on the tour don't even try to scare. The first, an antique house that might have had dead children buried in its back yard, is basically an open house for people to acquire decorating tips.

The other, Ashford Manor, a bed and breakfast, merely has a voice-over narration that switches between a lame ghost story and commercials.

If students are looking for a place to take old people who can't handle real scares or love perusing through stacks of antiques, Watkinsville's Historical Haunts Tour might be the order of the night.

Taking children for the latter portion of the tour is risky, as they might break something expensive, while teens and college students beware -- no amount of pre-tour partying will make this haunted fiasco frightening.

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