King’s Island Halloween Haunt

Wyatt Hodge, MVC writer and photographer
November 21, 2022

I was looking for a terrifying experience this October, so when my friend invited me to Kings Island’s Halloween Haunt event, I gladly accepted. I had read up on the event and I was looking forward to all the horrors in store.

We arrived thirty minutes before the park opened at 6:00 p.m. As we waited for the park to fully open I spotted the various spooky decorations in the park’s main area. There were skeletons on the roofs, spiders in the trees, and pumpkins all around. When the park opened, a voice came through the speakers and told us that the park was being investigated for “paranormal activity.” At the end, a demonic voice took over the speakers and the event began.

Flame erupted from the fountain in the center of the park and instantly there were ghouls and monsters lurking in the crowd. There were creatures such as witches, zombies, demons, and a few unnameable monstrosities. Most of them were scattered throughout the crowds, but a few loomed over it on freakishly long legs. Obviously I knew these were all actors in costumes, but their performances combined with the smoke machines scattered around established an eerie vibe.

The rides themselves were largely unchanged. The only difference I noticed was some fog on the forest floor beneath The Beast. The biggest changes to the park were the decorations, the “scare zones” where the monsters roamed free and the mazes.

Admittedly we were not looking very hard, and we had chosen not to grab a map, but it still took my friend and I five hours to find one of the mazes. Once we found the first maze we realized that there were neon signs of a green spider and red skull leading the ways to the mazes.

I was looking forward to getting lost in the terrifying mazes and finding nightmares around every corner, but the “mazes” were not a maze at all, just normal haunted houses. I did only three of the six mazes. They were just winding corridors with some mildly spooking things in them, and most of the fear was lost when I inevitably ran into the group in front of mine.

Overall the experience was fun, but the Halloween Haunt did not add much to the experience. I would rather go to a haunted house park like Indy Scream Park or Hanna Haunted Acres for a terrifying night.

A lot of the park was covered in fog machines and red lights, creating a creepy atmosphere. I was genuinely terrified whenever a horrifying creature came lurking out of the fog.
Spooky decorations were set up all over the park to help build the atmosphere. This pumpkin decoration was in a section of the park covered in hay and jack-o-lanterns.
The mazes around the park didn’t have very long lines, but there were still decorations set up to set the mood for the mazes. This gargoyle was just outside an ancient crypt themed maze.
This is a wider picture of the pumpkin area. Jack-o-lanterns with ghastly faces hang above and beyond them loomed the Banshee coaster, lit up in the night.
This is the main corridor of the park, taken just in front of the entrance. The entire corridor was filled with red and blue lighting reflecting off the fog.
Before the event officially opened, people were allowed to enter through the gates and wait by the entrance. From there people could see skeletons and other decorations adorning the buildings.
This is one of the terrifying creatures that loomed over the crowd. The image is blurry because if it caught me taking a picture I would have been its next victim.