Upstairs, they cracked ciphers and ogled at creepy dolls. All the while, they learned about ancient history, tuberculosis and Saranac Lake’s past while reveling in frightening sights and information.

The event, organized by Historic Saranac Lake, was the brainchild of a child who is into brains. Actually, Lake Placid Elementary School fourth-grader Lydia Francis is into brains, ghosts, spiders, mummies and anything creepy.

“For her birthday she wanted a Ouija board and a metal detector to find buried treasure,” Lydia’s mother Kelsey said.

Her dad, David, says she’s always been into the macabre. He remembers Lydia being excited to learn in a book about making mummies about how Egyptians pulled the dead’s brains out through their noses for preservation.

Historic Saranac Lake Events Coordinator Alex Krach shows Tyler Stack how to crack a cipher at HSL’s “Historic Scare-anac Lake” event on Thursday. The idea was the creepy concoction of Lake Placid Elementary School fourth-grader Lydia Francis. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

Lydia’s push for a paranormal party came about early this year after the 2023 FISU Winter World University Games in Lake Placid. Her family had been attending a lot of the sporting events, and while they had a good time, Lydia wondered why people weren’t celebrating spooky things, too — bones and caves and secret passageways.

Initially, she wanted to write to President Joe Biden. Kelsey convinced her to start local and suggested writing a letter to the editor in the Enterprise.

HSL Archivist and Curator Chessie Monks-Kelly said when she read the letter, she knew she wanted HSL to get involved. She responded and asked Francis to come help them put it on.

“I was really surprised,” Lydia said.

She wasn’t sure if she’d get a response.

Lake Placid Elementary School fourth-grader Lydia Francis peers through a stereoscope to see a ghostly image at Historic Saranac Lake’s “Historic Scare-anac Lake” event on Thursday. The three-dimensional image seen through one of these is created through two photographs taken at slightly different angles and viewed at the same time, playing a trick on the eyes. “This optical illusion was the Victorian-age’s version of today’s virtual reality,” reads a sign on the table. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

“Now it’s her thing,” Kelsey said.

Lydia’s grandparents even came up from Rochester to see the spooky shindig.

Lydia was all smiles in her plague doctor costume as she and a cohort of other kids ran around, coloring, reading, playing and learning.

Monks-Kelly and HSL Events Coordinator Alex Krach’s job was to take the eerie and make it educational by finding parallels, taking something historical and connecting it to spooky pop culture.

Dr. Frankenstein’s lab was a segue to talking about Dr. Trudeau’s lab where he studied tuberculosis and bacteria.

Noah and Amy Kramer read about historic dolls at Historic Saranac Lake’s “Historic Scare-anac Lake” event on Thursday. While the dolls aren’t haunted, one was made with real human hair and the other is said to look like the girl who owned her. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

Tuberculosis, a disease which made people cough up blood, was a segue to talk about vampires, with their pale skin and gaunt appearance. Krach said researchers have found evidence of tuberculosis being found in the bodies of mummies. After thousands of years, this disease was cured.

Speaking of cures and mummies, Krach talked about how people used to ingest mummified remains as a quack medical remedy, another segue to talk about medicine and science.

HSL Executive Director Amy Catania said Krach did a great job with mixing history and the heebie-jeebies.

Krach himself just wrapped up his first month of work at HSL. He was thrilled to be working with people who wanted to make something like this happen.

“I love that they empowered her vision,” he said. “Just to be able to join this team at this time is super awesome.”

Lake Placid Elementary School fourth-grader Lydia Francis, in her plague doctor costume, poses for a photo with her grandmother who traveled from Rochester to see the “Historic Scare-anac Lake” event Francis helped organize at Historic Saranac Lake on Thursday. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

Krach said horror author Edgar Allen Poe was big into ciphers, playing into his mysterious aura at a time when people saw the ability to crack them as something supernatural.

“He issued a challenge in a magazine: ‘If you send me ciphers and try to stump me I’ll solve them all,'” Krach said. “We think he probably solved most of them because they were his own ciphers that he was turning into himself.”

Locally, the legendary hermit of the High Peaks, Noah John Rondeau wrote many of his journals in ciphers while living alone in the woods for years in the early- to mid-1900s. Krach said it took until 1992 to crack all of them.

Lydia’s favorite part of the event was the dolls — Betty and Hannah. While the dolls aren’t haunted, one was made with real human hair and the other is said to look like the girl who owned her, an uncanny window into the past.

Lydia said she got into creepy things when she was 2 or 3.

“It made me feel happy,” she said. “It was very enjoyable.”

While spooky things like horror movies might make other people uncomfortable, she said that’s because feel like it’s going to happen to them, that there really is someone in the closet. But she said she’s not worried about that.

Excitedly, Lydia talked about how, a while back, she made a ouija board out of paper at a friend’s house and felt someone breathing near them.

When she met with HSL staff to plan a couple weeks ago she wore her plague doctor costume. Kelsey said the plague doctor costume was coincidental. She bought it a year in advance and doesn’t even know how Lydia knew about plague doctors.

Enterprise staff noticed a number of plague doctors out on main streets on Halloween this year as they photographed the trick-or-treaters, and asked Monks-Kelly about this. Monks-Kelly said she was not surprised. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the frightening imagery of plague doctors came into pop culture consciousness again, as they are a symbol of disease.

Something else she noticed was fewer doctor and nurse costumes this year. She thought for some, this image might hit too close to home for people who spent time in hospitals during the pandemic and predicted it might be a while until people see many of those costumes again.

The Historic Saranac Lake crew also said they plan to bring back the “Historic Scare-anac Lake” event for this year’s “Creepy Carnival” in February.