No more Winter’s Dream

By Cathy DeDe, Chronicle Managing Editor

Winter’s Dream is done. The Warren County Coalition plans to end its affiliation with Moment Factory, the Montreal-company they hired to create the attraction at Fort William Henry.

Envisioned as a perennial event, it only ran one winter, 2023-2024.

Fort William Henry President Sam Luciano, speaking for the Coalition, tells The Chronicle they aim to use assets from Winter’s Dream to create a new year-round attraction of their own.

“The story right now is it’s in development,” Mr. Luciano says. “The Coalition has not dissolved. We’ve been working hard, meeting every month. (We) are looking to end the contract with Moment Factory and the Winter’s Dream aspect, and move on to the next phase.”

They’ll create a new plan “so we can continue to give money back to the County,” he says.

In 2023, Warren County seeded Winter’s Dream with $3 million of Occupancy Tax funds. It opened in November of 2023 and closed early in March 2024.

The Coalition promised to pay Warren County back over five years, splitting projected revenues 50-50 with re-investments in the attraction.

As it turns out, attendance was not as expected; there was no profit to share.

After that first season, the Coalition returned about $50,000 of the $3 million that they had not spent.

In 2024-25, Winter’s Dream did not open. The Coalition originally aimed to improve it and bring it back next winter.

Now, Mr. Luciano says, they plan to meet with Moment Factory next week and terminate the contract.

“We hope to end it amicably,” he says. “We don’t know, down the road we may want to use them again.”

The Coalition is scheduled to meet with the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, May 13, to discuss their plans for what’s next and how that might be structured to benefit the County, Mr. Luciano says.

Their idea now: “What we found at the Fort William Henry is there’s an interest in ghost tours and paranormal, things like that, on a year-round basis” not just in the busy summer, Mr. Luciano says.

He said that new winter ghost tours added this year “sold out each night.”

They hope to build on that with enhanced tours using the Winter’s Dream assets they outright own — elements of the “Lakes” display that was installed in one of the Fort’s bastions, the large cabin structure, “tools, equipment and pallet jacks, Christmas trees and different sets, not elaborate, not a big arsenal, but different things to use for sets.”

Given the non-compete clause in the Moment Factory contract, Mr. Luciano said, “We will not use any of their intellectual property, not their sound, their storyline, their score of music. It won’t be an immersive light show. It’ll be something different.”

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