🧛♀️ Fangs, Fog, and Fun: Vampire Orienteering at Danehy Park, 2025!
- mikayla7123
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
What do you get when you mix 245 daring adventurers, spooky mist, and a map full of mysterious checkpoints? Our 2025 Annual Vampire Orienteering Event at Danehy Park, of course!
This year’s Halloween week brought out a huge crowd of fearless participants. 77 teams zigzagged through the park’s shadowy trails, dodging “vampires,” finding checkpoints, and racing against time—all under a perfectly eerie blanket of mist that made it feel straight out of a movie.
Photo Credit: Caroline Salis 2025 - Vampire-O 2025 participants taking part in the fun!
To play the game, participants formed teams and were given a punch card and an orienteering map with 25 checkpoints on it. The goal of the game was to find as many of these checkpoints as possible in the 1 hour time limit. Here’s the catch, some teams were randomly selected to be “vampires”. Vampire teams ran around trying to tag regular teams, transforming them into the vampires, and taking their punch card for their own. If you were tagged, you lost your punch card and needed to find another team to tag to get back in the game. Red glowstick necklaces marked a vampire team, allowing others to try to escape - if they kept their wits about them! Luckily, there were a few protection items placed at random checkpoints to make the teams who found them immune to the vampire's bite!
This year we had 17 - that's right, you heard correctly - 17 teams get all 25 checkpoints in the 1 hour time limit! This is a record number of teams that were able to navigate the map quickly and correctly! Congratulations to every team who took part, above all the goal of Vampire-O is to have fun, so well done to everyone who accomplished that mission!
This playful and creative version of orienteering is one of our favorite games and our favorite event of the year. We couldn’t have done it without the incredible help of our Cambridge Volunteers, our dedicated regular volunteers, and the enthusiastic CRLS Orienteering Team. You all kept the night running smoothly—and the vampires well fed (figuratively, of course). We are a very small team, so running an event with over 240 participants simply wouldn’t be possible without a strong and reliable volunteer force. We are endlessly grateful for your commitment and enthusiasm.
Photo Credit: Dave Yee, Barb Bryant, Maija Pratt 2025 - Our amazing volunteers running all of our stations!
A huge thank you to the City of Cambridge Department of Human Service Program for sponsoring and making the event free for all participants—your support helps keep this spooky community tradition accessible and fun for everyone. And special thanks to the staff at Danehy Park for welcoming us year after year, keeping the park clean, safe, and ready for a night of adventure!
From first-time orienteers to seasoned map masters, everyone brought great energy and Halloween spirit to celebrate a decade of Navigation Games and another Vampire Orienteering event. Here’s to ten more years of frightful fun, clever navigation, and community adventure under the moonlight! 🌕🗺️
See you next year… if you dare. 🧛♂️
Excited for more?! We will be holding our 🍀Leprechaun-O Event 🍀for the second year in a row this March at Fresh Pond Reservation in Cambridge. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter at navigationgames.org to get updates on the finalized date and other upcoming events - and don't forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook!
Instagram: navigationgames_
Facebook: Navigation Games
2025 Vampire-O Results
Sponsored by: Cambridge City Manager and
