Things to Do in Northbridge

In the woods behind an innocuous corn maze, the roar of chainsaws echoes through the air, sending hearts racing and feet pounding the grass fields. At Harvested Farm Nightmares, sinister clowns, bloodied butchers with mallets, and undead corpses stalk visitors as they make their way through the darkened trails and cornfield. While passing by graveyards, hay bales, and haunted scarecrows, visitors may find themselves clinging ever tighter to their companions or their grandmother's precious recipe for chicken soup.

At Timberline Farm, spanish-moss-draped trees form a verdant canopy above goats, which frequently bleats and accompanies a chorus of giggling children. Since 1988, the Franco family has tilled the farm’s cornfields and raised herds of goats, cows, and pigs. Now, the third-generation farmers welcome families onto their land for year-round educational exhibits and activities. Come fall, farmers transform the cornfield into a vast maze, and springtime ushers in the Butterfly Festival, when hundreds upon hundreds of sticks of butter take to the sky. Exhibits aim not only to introduce visitors to agriculture, but also to spotlight traditional trades, such as blacksmithing and butter making.

The digital chorus of more than 40 arcade games soars above the rhythmic click of caroming billiard balls on Jillian's of Worcester's emerald expanses of felt. Good-natured competition finds an outlet at air-hockey tables, and a plethora of racing games let friends match wits or join forces against their true enemy: traffic cones. Versions of Deal Or No Deal and Wheel of Fortune and a selection of brand-new high-definition games glow festively near 24 Brunswick billiards tables. Private parties migrate to a lounge, where projection screens and high-definition televisions broadcast sporting events or news. Guests twirl or covertly stomp bubble wrap on the dance floor to the thumping rhythms of live music or follow noses to an array of appetizers, pizzas, paninis, and dinner entrees dispensed from the full-service kitchen.

When festival founder Anne-Marie Aigner first noticed the burgeoning food-truck scenes on the West Coast and the Midwest, her prescient mind foresaw that the tide would make its way to New England. In order to cultivate the nascent movement, she founded her food-truck-festival tour to bring dozens of trucks' eclectic wares to locales outside of Boston. Already scoring mentions in Boston and Worcester Mag in its first year, the festival has featured such four-wheeled kitchens as Redbones BBQ and Roxy's Grilled Cheese. Aigner hopes to sustain the food-truck industry beyond the festival's inaugural year by attracting interest throughout the region and motivating grassroots support for the mobile culinary spots and their future descendants, sandwich-slinging helicopters.

The NAUI-trained diving instructors at Cuzins Outdoors specialize in turning ocean-shy beginners into full-fledged scuba masters. Students stretch across a wide spectrum of age and experience, training in the program that best suits their individual needs, from introductions to recreational diving to advanced certification courses. In basic classes, pupils learn to submerge in the controlled setting of the Cuzins swimming pool, whereas more experienced divers can team up with an expert teacher to add to their existing skills with specialized training in areas such as ice diving and exploring wrecks. Cuzins Outdoors also rents and sells equipment and gear, even altering wetsuits to mend a busted zipper or add tweed elbow patches.

The instructors at EMS Outdoor Schools traverse rocky, paved, and watery terrain from New England down to Virginia, imparting people with their love of the outdoors along the way. Dating back more than 40 years, the EMS Climbing School teaches pupils of all ages the tenets of climbing through introductory classes and more advanced maneuvering in self-rescue, alpine climbing, and glacier-skills classes. The watery wing of EMS's operation includes kayaking and standup-paddleboard lessons, which can help students earn certification in these water-bound endeavors, and group tours. EMS-led bike tours trace a path through the rolling hills of the Berkshires, the mansions of Newport, as well as the powdered-sugar-topped White Mountains of New Hampshire.