Haunted Journeys 2: Home Haunts

Sorry for the time away, didn't mean to leave such a huge gap in between posts but I've been busy with a dozen things of late and this little project sort of fell to the wayside. I'd hope to finish this series before the month of October, but no matter. Without further adieu, I give you Haunted Journeys 2: Home Haunts.

As I'm sure anyone who reads my wife's blog will see our mutual love of autumn and Halloween is something that has really shaped and defined our relationship over the years. On our first Halloween together we bought up nearly everything we could find from the local Party City and raided her dad's front yard, much to his surprise.

Paula's dad was quite horrified to come home from work to this, though he did calm down after we explained that the hanging skeletons had not in fact been painted onto the garage door as he had assumed.

Since Paula and I have moved in together we've pretty much been apartment people, which is something that we're quite glad of most of the year. We neither have a driveway to shovel in winter nor a yard to maintain in summer. Alas, the apartment lifestyle has robbed us of the opportunity of building our own Halloween home haunt. We don't even have a front porch to decorate much less anywhere to build a cemetery or corn maze. This is a problem we are looking into remedying but for the time being we placate ourselves by living vicariously through the efforts of others.

Most of the year it's quite hard to get our Halloween fix. There are always the dark rides and haunted houses I reviewed in my previous post but they are few and far between in Ontario, and there are only so many times a year you can visit the same attraction before it starts to get dull. There are year round X-mas stores to be found in some malls but no such places exist for the Halloween enthusiast.  This year I had the very good fortune of discovering The American Scream which I've watched at least twenty times on Netflix already (if you haven't seen this movie by the way I highly recommend it. Both this movie and it's soundtrack will be the first things on my X-mas list this year). Next year my wife and I are looking into attending The Canadian Haunted Attractions Conference and Scarefest. We do what we can to keep the spirit of the season alive throughout the year until October rolls around and we can once again revel in the devilish delights of our favorite holiday.

Now again I'm going to give some clarification of terms before moving on. Genuine home haunting, setting up a haunted house in one's home or yard, is sadly more of an American past time than a Canadian one. The haunts reviewed in this post were all either hosted at a farm (which is a business of sorts, but a family business) or were non-profit charity haunts. However I think of home haunting as the realm of the competent amateur. These attractions are put together mostly out of pocket by the people hosting them, which are constructed and worked with the aid of their friends, family and local volunteers. Sadly, without the financial backing of some corporate entity, many people can't maintain these events and they tend to shut down after only a few years of operation. That being the case I've only been able to visit three home haunts as many of the attractions I stumble across online got shut down before I discovered them.

I will be rating these haunts via the same "Spooky"and "Scary"  meters I used in my previous post, where "Spookiness" measures decor, atmosphere and spectacle and "Scariness" measures the intensity of the scare tactics at play.


Screamfest, White Rock Ostrich Farm, Milton Ontario (closed)

And no, those are not "orbs", it was just raining that night...
or was it?

I remember Screamfest very fondly. This was the first haunt my wife and I found when we decided to expand our yearly thrills beyond "Canada's Wonderland's Halloween Haunt". It was also the event that made us invest in a GPS system for our car. As mentioned in my first ever guest post about Carnival Diablo we got hopelessly lost in search of this haunt. Looking for a farm out in the countryside at night is no easy task, especially when said farm is buried in a tangled thicket of infuriatingly nondescript roads named either Nth Side or Nth Line. It doesn't look that confusing on the map but trust me, once you get out there, every street you turn down will have only one of two names! It was only after we'd given up and were headed home that we finally passed the sign reading White Rock Ostrich Farm. While these may not seem like fond memories, they are. The trip is half the fun for these events and nothing adds to the tension like that feeling of being good and lost out in the countryside.

Screamfest itself was a single, guided, walk-through haunted house. The lineup was tented, which was appreciated as it was raining that night. A documentary on old horror films played on repeat on an old television set and as you waited you had a chance to"bone-up" on the Screamfest rules of engagement. The lineup was long but that isn't necessarily a bad thing as it usually means there is some form of crowd control in play. Groups maxing out at about four or five people were permitted to go through. When one group had reached the cemetery, the next group could go through and so on.

This guy would actually say what was written on the |
tombstone in a deep, grim reapery voice. It was really
cool!

Once inside you waited for a few moments in the front foyer of the house to be greeted by your guide who leads you through the haunted hallways beyond. This haunt was a descent length, three or four rooms  inside as I recall and a cemetery at the back. There were a number of store bought decorations that I recognized but they were all used appropriately, meaning that decorations were not just randomly placed like you might see in a decorated yard. Creepy pictures were hung in the hallway, tombstones in the cemetery, a place for everything and everything in it's place as it were.

Screamfest utilized quite a few beloved gags of the haunting world. Picture frames opened so actors could howl at you from the walls, the thing you think is a stuffed dummy that leaps out of its chair at you, the prisoner who taunts you as you pass and then escapes from his cell to bar your exit. Many of the actors were quite whimsical in their performances however, making this a more fun for the whole family affair.

At the end we got to meet the people hosting the event, which is something I always love about home haunts over professional ones. We bought some ostrich burgers and learned that ostrich is actually a red meat and does taste very much like beef only without the fat and grease and everything that makes beef unpleasant to digest. We also told them about all the trouble we had getting there and they said we weren't the first. A lot of road names out in the rural regions of Ontario require some much needed updating on MapQuest as it turns out. For this reason we not only bought a GPS, as I mentioned, but we also try to scout out haunt locations about a month in advance. Unfortunately in doing my research for this post I have learned the Screamfest is currently no longer in operation. As mentioned in their statement however this seems to be more of a hiatus than an end, either way they will be missed.

Rating

Spookiness:
Not perfectly beveled around the edges, a few blank halls and rooms and a few noticeable, unmodified store bought decorations, but everything present is used appropriately and a solid attempt at a haunted house atmosphere is given.

Scariness:
Good use of actors and misdirection with just the right amount of whimsy to keep things from becoming too intense.

Haunted House of Horrors, Guelph Ontario 

I remember this particular haunt being something of a last minute find. It was nearing the end of October and we'd visited all the haunts we'd intended to when I stumbled across a news article online about a free haunt being hosted in Guelph on Halloween night. We threw the word out and before we knew it Paula had assembled a small posse of friends to accompany us, which is funny because we usually declare our plans about a month in advance only to wind up visiting most haunts on our own.

The Haunted House of Horrors was a butcher shop themed haunted house, although in truth there were a variety of settings inside from the bedroom of a possessed child undergoing an exorcism to an unnecessary surgery ward. This was good length haunt, about 5 rooms as I recall. Quite big on spectacle although personally I found its varied themes weakened the overall atmosphere. It was also oddly well lit for a haunted house, which worked to its detriment as well. Despite these few flaws the Haunted House of Horrors was a tonne of fun. It drew quite a crowd and our own group went through a total of three times before the evening was out. We arrived early so the attraction wasn't in full swing yet. When we first went through the entire haunt consisted of animated props but as the evening went on the actors began to appear. It was actually pretty cool because the haunt got more and more intense each time we went through.

This attraction  is the brainchild of haunter Shawn Gusz. He makes haunts for charity but to my knowledge both this haunt and all it's incarnations since have been free of charge for guests, so I'm not entirely sure how he manages to raise any money. I do know he sold the property where the Haunted House of Horrors was held and moved on to make a Victorian style haunt named The True Fear Haunted Funeral Home, which I didn't even hear about until after it was auctioned off. I would love to have purchased it but at the time I didn't have $75,000 to spare... I also had nowhere to keep it, which is always a problem. Almost every year he puts on a completely different show and as such this review can only speak to the butcher shop haunt I attended and not to his work as a whole.

Rating

Spookiness:
There were one or two exceedingly detailed rooms, but the well lit interior and overly varied themes watered down the atmosphere a bit.

Scariness:
Good use of scary props and actors. Use of gory images, loud noises and frightening performances from actors make this a little less playful than other haunts.


Scream Shack, Cold Water, Ontario


This one was a little out of our way. Cold Water is over an hours drive north of where we are and the first night we tried to go the weather made us turn back. We tried again the following weekend and made the trip successfully. By this time Paula and I had been going to haunts for a few years now and we had the forethought to scout Scream Shack out ahead of time so we wouldn't get lost.

Of the home haunts I've been to this one impressed me the most. It was easily on par with a professional haunt, hell it was better than a lot professional haunts! Every year Scream Shack presents three different haunted houses. When we went there was another butchers shop, a hotel and a jungle with ancient ruins. If I had to pick a weakness that would be it as each attraction was quite short. Personally I would have preferred that Scream Shack had been a single, longer attraction than three shorter ones. Despite its limited space however what Scream Shack accomplishes is truly astounding. As I'm sure I've mentioned I love my haunts heavy in atmosphere and Scream Shack has atmosphere in spades. Just stop by their website and look at their Ghoul Gallery. The level of detail in each scene quite incredible, but this attention to detail goes beyond visuals. In Granny's Butchers Shop there was a newsreel playing in the front room detailing Granny's atrocious crimes. In Hotel Crow there was a rickety elevator complete with blinking lights, grinding gears and discordant elevator music. The creators of Scream Shack are true craftsmen utilizing sights, sounds, props and actors to horrifying effect.

Despite the level of professionalism Scream Shack is still a home haunt and as such it relies heavily on local volunteers for support, including children. This can take the teeth out of the horror a bit, as a kid's attempt at this...

... squee

comes across more like this...

Dawww!

 Also, as with Screamfest the performances of the adult actors were a bit light hearted. But these are more general comments than negative criticisms, for although giggling kids and whimsical performances can take some of the edge out of the horror it ultimately adds to the overall charm of the haunt. Everyone involved in a home haunt is there for the sheer love of haunting. They genuinely enjoy what they're doing and as a guest you get a bit of a contact high off of their enthusiasm that no professional haunt can replicate.

Rating

Spookiness:
Overwhelming attention to detail and very immersive environments. This haunt only falls short of a full 5 due to the shortness of each event. Each haunted house really draws you into their world, but you're not there long enough to be really be swept away by it.

Scariness: 
Incredible use of actors, props and environments to deliver scares but performances are light hearted enough to keep things feeling friendly and fun. Plus, kids in ill fitting costumes are just adorable :)

Well, I guess that's it for my home haunt segment of Haunted Journeys. Only one more post to write now, and with any luck it won't take me another month to write it. Stay tuned for Haunted Journeys 3: Professional Haunts, coming to you... whenever I get to it.

Richard Vaughan