It's October, and that means Graham Creek Nature Preserve is ready to give you a bone-chilling scare.

Graham Creek Nature Preserve has become well-known for its annual Haunted Forest. Each year, Leslie Gahagan, environmental manager for the City of Foley, and her staff let their imaginations run. Their creative and twisted minds create a new bone-chilling theme each year that keeps visitors coming back for more.

The theme for the ninth-annual Graham Creek Haunted Forest is "Asylum," and it is not for the faint of heart. Enter the asylum of terror for a spine-tingling journey with flashing lights, deafening noises and hair-raising scares.

Gahagan and her team have transformed the trail into a menacing mental hospital and haunted prison. Visitors become patients as they are admitted into the mental hospital. Patients are guaranteed to encounter nightmarish scenes and deranged minds. Will you escape the clutches of the asylum? If you do, the next stop is the haunted prison full of death row escapees. Will you make it through the winding trails full of darkness and terror?

Each year, the guests are taken on a different path through the forest. Gahagan does not want people to predict where the trail turns.

The trail, roughly a half mile in length, leads guests through a variety of scenes staffed with 100 volunteers, actors and Graham Creek employees.

The Graham Creek Haunted Trail is for visitors ages eight years and up only. No exceptions will be made. General admission tickets are $20 and deluxe admission, which includes a T-shirt, is $40.

No-Scare Halloween Ride

Thanks to the requests of past visitors, a No-Scare Halloween Ride has been added for younger children on a different side of the park.

The ride will take guests on a 1-mile trail from the south side of the Interpretive Center to the playground and back. The family-friendly Halloween scenes set up at the playground will include large inflatable characters and scenes that aren't scary.

Tickets are $5 per rider and are available to purchase on-site with cash. The ride runs from 6:30 to 8 p.m.

Fright funds education

The Graham Creek Haunted Trail is more than just a fun and frightening activity.

"Because we are a municipality, we budget how much I am going to spend each year on each event and education," Gahagan said. "As my revenue stream for the haunted forest has grown, I am able to leverage that to do more educational programming."