Since I still can’t stop being inspired by the movie Haunt, (Go watch it if you haven’t yet, and then read my review in the previous post!) I thought it might be interesting to share the story of the one and only time I ever actually visited a haunted attraction.
Yes, you read that right. Something relating to horror/Hallloween was a one-and-done for me.
Let me explain.
I grew up very close to quite a few of the types of farms that people flock to during the autumn months, for pumpkin picking, apple picking, and spooky good times. Traffic in my area on a fall weekend is an absolute nightmare. But anyway, the biggest and probably most well-known of these farms is a place called Heaven Hill, still known to this day for their annual Great Pumpkin Festival, which, yes, I sometimes still attend as an adult.
The first time I went to Heaven Hill, though, was on a kindergarten class trip. We’d spent the prior week learning about types of apples and different kinds of jack o’lantern faces, and I was absolutely loving life because this would have been the first Halloween season that I was actually anticipating, having trick-or-treated for the first time the year before. It was an absolutely perfect day and I remember many aspects of it, such as how cute the little boy all of us girls had a crush on looked, the boy who lost a tooth biting into an apple, decorations I saw on the bus rides to and from, and the face my grandfather drew on the pumpkin I picked when I wouldn’t allow him to cut it. If the goal was to make memories, we succeeded. Heaven Hill became my central memory of pre-Halloween fun.
One thing that really stuck with me, though, possibly more than anything else, was the hayride.
A hayride was something I truly had never experienced before, and I found it so fun and fallish, even at five years of age. I remembered the path being decorated, too, and hearing someone say that the decorations were for the nighttime hayrides. So, naturally, I wanted to go. As a kid with a very strict bedtime routine, Halloween being the exception was a huge deal, and if I could extend that with another hayride, this time at night just like trick-or-treating, what more could I possibly ask for?
It didn’t happen, though, and I know now that there was a very good reason I was not allowed on a haunted hayride at the age of five. I will be forever grateful to my parents for saving me from myself on that one.
I don’t think the subject came up again until I was around ten. We didn’t go to Heaven Hill much in my childhood because it was always super crowded and the most expensive place to pick pumpkins, so my mother would bring me to a much smaller, cozier, slightly closer farm instead. In fact, it wasn’t even Heaven Hill that got me thinking about haunted hayrides again once I was older. A new farm opened up right around Halloween that year and immediately hung up a huge, spray-painted sign declaring
HAUNTED HAYRIDE: THE SCREAM MACHINE
Seeing as how this new farm was more or less in the center of town, and we passed it on the way to literally everything, I noticed. And I begged to go. My parents claimed a few times that they called for tickets but the hayride wasn’t running those nights. I have no idea if this was the truth or not, or if it was too expensive or too late at night or if they somehow just knew that the little girl whose favorite holiday was Halloween, yet she was still scared of her own shadow, wouldn’t be able to handle it. But regardless, it didn’t happen that year, either.
Cut to, if my memory is serving me correctly, the year 2000. I’m now in eighth grade, just turned thirteen. I don’t know how the subject of haunted hayrides came up again, as the “Scream Machine” didn’t seem to last more than that first year, but it did. I was eager as ever, talking everyone’s ears off about the decorations I remembered from kindergarten, what an amazing spooky atmosphere it would be, etc. And finally, finally, I convinced my Aunt Trish to take me. Back to my roots, at Heaven Hill Farm. What could be more perfect?
Oh, darling Pumpkinseed Self, absolutely anything!
We got there, I think around 7:30 or so, on a Friday night, after me having been hyped up at school as if I’d found a winning lottery ticket and seven cups of coffee, and I was so excited. It was so cool to see the farm and all the decor at night, and each wagon had a guide that was in costume…A magical, pre-Halloween night, or so it should have been.
When we loaded the wagon, a young girl in a vampire costume acting as our guide, laid some ground rules, including not harassing the monsters when they came onto the wagon. This, right away, didn’t sit well with me. I don’t think it even occurred to me that there would be monsters, as in, real, live people! I thought we were just going to look at the spooky decorations I remembered from my youth, but at night. If anything, I expected maybe some jump scares, but from outside the wagon, as we passed. I didn’t think there would be any actual interaction. I immediately started to have second thoughts, but pushed them inside as we were all instructed to scream to “wake the dead” as the hayride started rolling, and the first turn we made was past a beautiful pumpkin-headed scarecrow. It felt like being in a spooky movie, and to this day, I remember that initial feeling, and cherish it.
But things started to go downhill for me as soon as the monsters did as promised and started coming aboard the wagon.
The first big scene I remember taking place was some costumed character, I can’t remember what he was dressed as now, and a girl who was planted on the hayride but we didn’t know it, performing a skit where he chopped the girl’s hand off. Now, keep in mind I was very much not into the horror aspect of Halloween at this point, so this was a lot for me. I also couldn’t wrap my newly teenage brain around this girl having been planted there and wondered if I was going to be expected to perform in some creepy skit too. I started to feel really self-conscious in addition to being scared, grossed out, and whatever else. Every single “monster” seemed to be getting in my face; I guess maybe I should have taken it as a compliment, that maybe I was giving a “Scream Queen” or “Final Girl” vibe, but at the time it was easily one of the most anxiety-inducing things I’d ever been through, and not in the fun way it was intended to be. At one point I was grabbed from behind by a werewolf, who I had no idea was there because I was paying attention to another monster further up on the wagon. I could not wait to get off that hayride. I also couldn’t tell you what any of the spooky decor I’d been so excited to see at night looked like, as I was so preoccupied by the monsters. It didn’t feel like a Halloween-related night at all to me. It just felt like a social anxiety nightmare.
Obviously, though, I came out of it alive, and I do remember passing the same scarecrow on the way out. That made it feel even more like a movie somehow; like he should have been on a title card saying “The End…Or is it?”
The funny thing, though, is as much as I hated the experience while it was happening, I could not stop talking about it after the fact. While I didn’t enjoy the monsters getting in my face, the experience as a whole had been incredibly interesting to me and I believe this was my first time really taking notice of the actual haunt industry and realizing how fascinated I was by it. Throughout the next year I spoke, randomly but often, about the way the actors did things, the scares, the stunts, etc., and I think deep down wished I could be part of it. It’s strange in a way, that I felt “on display” in a sense as a patron, but find the idea of working for a haunt so intriguing.
I’m honestly still not sure what it is about live-actor-haunts that keeps me away…I’ve tried one very small thing since then, a dark circus maybe five or so years ago now, and had to leave because I had a massive panic attack passing through the tiny haunt they had set up before the main part of the venue. I suppose I just don’t like having people in my face, being expected to sort of “act back” on command, as the Renaissance Faire I had gone to a year or so before the haunted hayride made me feel very similar and to this day I refuse to go near another one of those, either. It sucks sometimes as I, of course, love the imagery and atmosphere of haunts. I just can’t physically attend one. Thank goodness for YouTube walkthroughs and, of course, movies like Haunt (Seriously, go watch it!) and The Houses October Built,
Anyway, the Heaven Hill haunted hayride eventually shut down, maybe ten or so years ago now, due to someone getting drunk and, I guess literally and figuratively, falling off the wagon.
I do have some pictures, though, of what the hayride looked like in the daytime, the last few times I went. (They still decorated even after the actual haunt was done.) These are old and were taken with an old camera so forgive the graininess.
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