Since I bought a Cedar Fair Platinum Pass for the first time this year, it was an easy decision to visit the Kings Island Halloween Haunt event. And what fun it is! They do an excellent job for Halloween. I don’t have any other Cedar Fair parks to compare it to, but it’s certainly better than Elitch Gardens in Denver. (But Elitch is a pitiful park overall anyway.)
The Kings Island Halloween Haunt takes place during weekends in October. (Generally speaking – I’ll be more specific at the end.) While the emphasis is on the very scary at night, there are events aimed at kids younger than 13 earlier in the day.
Halloween Haunt
Halloween Haunt is Kings Island’s signature event, aimed at older kids and adults. It is potentially terrifying just to walk around the park, so be aware of your smaller kids’ fright level and what they can handle, even if you aren’t going into the haunted mazes themselves.
The Eiffel Tower takes on sinister eyes that overlook the park in all directions. Special lighting and fog effects throughout the park give it a spooky atmosphere. Specially-themed scare zones bring the scares right up behind you. And in five locations around the park, you can enter highly-themed haunted houses that will guarantee frightening scenes and plenty of jump scares.
Haunted Houses/Mazes
Kings Island has five “mazes” – the name they give their scary haunted house attractions. These are evenly scattered around the park, but some are tucked so far into a corner that they can be hard to find.
Killmart
One of the scariest mazes is Killmart, right on the Coney Mall strip and easy to find. I also found this one to have the longest line, but the lines for all mazes move pretty quickly, even on the most crowded nights – what looks like an hour wait really only takes about 10-15 minutes.
Killmart is zombie-themed, with scenes right out of The Walking Dead. You wind your way through a destroyed big-box store past zombies just out of reach. (The “K” in Killmart looks a lot like the “K” in K-mart.) The level of detail is fantastic, and this is the only maze where a scare made me accidentally grab the stranger in front of me.
Slaughterhouse
Conversely, Slaughterhouse is a little harder to find, tucked all the way back beside The Beast roller coaster. I would say that Slaughterhouse and Killmart are the two scariest mazes in the park. And Slaughterhouse is just what you would think from the name – a frightening, human-meat butcher with lots of (fake) blood and gore.
What gets me about this one are the sheets of plastic and hanging rubbery meat threads that you have to push through, which obscure your view of what’s ahead. It also has the boldest scare actors – no one can touch you, but I had someone breathing down my neck only to pop out at me and scare me again later. Sometimes they even follow you outside!
Madame Fatale’s Cavern of Terror
I confess I found Madame Fatale’s Cavern of Terror pretty darn scary, but I think mainly because it was the first one I went through. This one has sort of a wax-museum-of-terrors vibe and has a huge animatronic demon-thing right at the start. I also love the setting of this one – you go down into what could be an archaeological dig with hieroglyphs and stone arches. It has a strong Indiana Jones feeling to it. Enough so that I wonder if it used to be the setting for some other ride that’s now defunct. You can find Madame Fatale’s Cavern next to the entrance to White Water Canyon.
C.H.A.O.S.
C.H.A.O.S. (Cerebral Health Association & Occupational Services) Labs, tucked into Area 72 next to Orion, is my favorite maze, my second try, and what gave me the courage to go through the rest of them. This one has a storyline of human lab experiments gone wrong. It is, first of all, less scary and gory, but secondly, it has a great funhouse feel. Early on, you go through a spinning tunnel, and near the end, you find yourself in a mirror maze. It doesn’t exactly make sense with the lab setting, but it is lots of fun and plenty eerie.
Cornered
Kings Island’s newest maze is Cornered, a haunted take on a corn maze. I like this one the least – the lanes are too broad, and it’s honestly not dark enough. You mainly wander around the path while some folksy “children of the corn” types pop out from behind haystacks. (SPOILER ALERT!) There is a fun scare at the end with an actor on big bungee cords, but it didn’t quite work out during my visit.
Scare Zones
Besides the five mazes, there are four “scare zones” out in the park in general. One of the most frightening things about these zones is that you pretty much have to walk through them to get around the park. And they can be just as frightening as the mazes! Most of the scares come from an actor popping up behind you while you’re looking around or just generally walking around looking menacing.
International Street Fear
International Street Fear is comprised of several walk-around characters right as you enter the park. These scare actors are as varied as a corpse bride and groom, a hawk-person on stilts, a demon, and bigfoot. Some sit still and only move when you get near them. One guy covered in green foliage seems to come out of nowhere! Combined with the eyes on the Eiffel Tower and jets of fire coming off the central fountain, it makes a very scary impression right off the bat.
Shipwrecked
Shipwrecked is themed to haunted/zombified pirates, but from what I could see, they mostly talked to people and posed for pictures. A few will jump out at you, but they seemed a pretty jovial bunch on the whole. These guys take up a corner of Action Zone across from Banshee and come with an impressive wrecked pirate ship and some firing cannons.
Coney Maul
Coney Maul is a good deal scarier with a twisted carnival theme along Coney Mall. There are fun overhead string lights, and these scare actors will come right up behind you with a horn or an evil laugh. There’s also a huge evil Jack in the Box animatronic that springs unexpectedly.
Pumpkin Eater
The scariest scare zone is Pumpkin Eater, in a tight lane from Coney Mall to Rivertown. Demonic voices chant in rhyme, lighted jack o’ lanterns are strung above, and scare actors come through the fog to frighten you. There’s also a terrifying pumpkin-headed animatronic in this area that will stand up now and then. I think it’s the chanting voices that get to me here.
Tricks and Treats Fall Fest
For younger kids not ready for the big-time scares of the haunted houses or the scare zones, Kings Island hosts the Tricks and Treats Fall Fest during daylight hours. There are 13 candy stations found around the park, and several family-oriented activities, like pumpkin carving, pedal tractors, costume contests, and a corn maze (which I suspect is Cornered without the scare actors.)
Hallowtween
Three areas do toned-down versions of their nighttime frights for kids too old for the toddler games but not old enough for the biggest scares. The Shipwrecked scare zone becomes a hunt for lost treasure. C.H.A.O.S. lab is launching an interstellar trip to Orion and needs your help. And Madame Fatale’s Cavern of Terror becomes the Museum of Mystery, where kids are detectives investigating a mysterious idol. In all, it’s an ingenious double-use of several spaces. It seems like it would be hard work switching each space over every night.
Shows
There are Halloween-themed shows all day, mainly in the time frame of the Fall Fest. There’s a dance party at the end of International Street, the “Witch Sisters” cast spells and tell scary stories in Rivertown, and the Fangtastics play in the Festhaus. A “You’re Too Old To Trick Or Treat” game show in the Bier Garten plays like a 60’s-era newlywed game. Then at after dark, the entertainment turns to blazing Classic Rock in the Festhaus and a Day of the Dead-themed drum show.
Of these, I only caught a bit of the game show and a fair amount of the drums. The drummers were great, but I didn’t like the canned singing and two dancers who didn’t seem to add much. The drummers did a fine job on their own. A costume contest that I buzzed by once looked super cute, however. Probably mainly for the parents of the kids involved.
On Saturdays, when the park is open all day, there is a 7 pm “release of the monsters” countdown. It lets all the families with younger kids know that things are about to get scary. You hear warnings through the loudspeaker system, then at 7:00, all the monsters line up in front of the International Street stage. Then at the sound of some VERY loud explosions, the monsters scatter through the crowd and into the park! You can hear the explosions from anywhere in the park, so you know the “Haunt” is actively on.
App Shortcomings
A note about the app here – I didn’t (at least readily) find showtimes in the app or posted anywhere, really. All there is are signs posted at each location with the times. And on a particularly busy day, the app stopped showing Haunt-specific stuff altogether or wait times for any attractions. It’s like it got overwhelmed, and no amount of restarting could get it going again. The Cedar Fair apps really are the worst. I would have done better to get a paper map – not for the map itself, but for the Halloween Haunt offerings like shows and food.
Food
There is Fall Fest/Halloween-specific food available, and a lot of it looked pretty good. They had offerings from a fig & goat cheese flatbread to a deep-fried Monte Cristo hot dog and several cupcakes and pies. I tried a burnt ends hash over tater tots and some vanilla & chocolate churros, and they were both just okay.
There are plenty of drink options too. One, in particular, is a red wine cocktail in a blood-donor bag. I walked by a guest dressed as a vampire sucking on one of those and thought it was highly appropriate! There are several other cocktails with and without alcohol and several beers. You could quickly get well sloshed if you wanted to spend the cash.
Dates/Hours
Kings Island Halloween Haunt ran in 2021 from September 24 – October 31, on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. It gets a little confusing – on Friday nights, they open from 6-midnight and pretty much only do the scarier Halloween Haunts activities – no monster release, no kids activities at all. And when I visited last Friday when it was a little drizzly, the park was almost empty, and I walked on several of the big coasters!
Saturday seems to be the main day, with hours from 11 am-midnight. The Fall Fest and Hallowtween run all day, then transition to Halloween Haunt at night, sort of in stages between 6-8 pm. The mazes open at 6:00, the monsters are “released” at 7:00, and the scare zones start at 8:00. (At least that’s what the map says – I feel like the scare zones began at 7 pm on the Saturday I was there.)
Then on Sundays, they just do the kid’s stuff from 11 am – 8 pm and no Halloween Haunt at all. I wonder if these are good days for rides, like my one lucky Friday. But I’d hate to miss all the Halloween Haunt stuff – it is so fun!
Conclusion
If you like Halloween or scary stuff at all or just enjoy a thrill, I’d recommend the Kings Island Halloween Haunt. I actually hate scary movies but love Halloween and “fun scare” stuff (and obviously like adrenaline thrills), and once I got up the courage to go through all the haunted houses on my own, I had a great time! The waits aren’t long for the haunts, the atmosphere is fantastic, and honestly, I mostly saw other folks getting zinged by the scare actors. Maybe they tend to leave solo folks alone, or maybe I was just extra aware of my surroundings, but they didn’t sneak up on me too often.
The biggest downside is that it was so crowded on Saturdays that riding any rides was almost impossible. Almost all coasters had 2+ hour wait times, and even smaller rides had crazy long lines. On a rainy Friday night, I had much better luck with very short waits for even Mystic Timbers and Diamondback, so I wonder if that’s the way to go. And I can’t speak for the kid’s events, but they looked cute! I don’t know that I’d hit up a theme park for a “fall fest,” though. I think I’d rather do an actual craft festival or something like that.
Here are a few more pictures of the park:
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