Teaching an Old Skeleton New Tricks
I am an old hand when it comes to Halloween haunts. I have been going to them for as long as I can rememember, and they have always been comfort food to me. When I was a kid, I would spend all day at the Joyland amusement park in Wichita, riding the Wacky Shack dark ride over and over and over again.
I love haunts, and I’ve traveled far to attend them, which makes it ironic that I had never been to the Halloween Haunt event at Worlds of Fun, despite having lived here in Kansas City for going on twenty years. In fact, I’m not positive that I had ever been to Worlds of Fun, full stop, before I made it out for the media night preview of the Halloween Haunt last week.
Though I was dimly aware of the Halloween Haunt, I think I had always written it off, imagining it to be something like a spooky Renaissance faire, where costumed scare actors wandered the park and spooky music was piped in over the PA system or something. I didn’t expect actual haunts nestled in among the rides. I certainly didn’t expect seven of them.
I went to Worlds of Fun as a representative of The Pitch, prepping for a month of haunt coverage to coincide with the Halloween season. As a member of the press, I was absolutely feted by the folks at Worlds of Fun, who treated me to their new Zombie Boo-ffet offering, which was a massive, all-you-can-eat banquet prepared by a very enthusiastic resident chef. Honestly, my greatest regret of the evening is that I didn’t arrive hungrier.
From there, my friend Tyler Unsell and I were allowed to explore the park and its various haunts at our leisure. As is always the case, I am told, the evening began with the Overlord’s Awakening, a parade of ghastly ghouls that kicked off the park’s transformation into haunted wonderland.
As I said, I wasn’t really expecting haunts qua haunts at all. And so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the haunts at Worlds of Fun are a match for just about any that I have ever attended. In rigor, each one is a notch or two below something like the Beast or Edge of Hell, Kansas City’s famous landmark haunts, each of which are multiple stories. But there are, as I mentioned, seven of them.
Themes include a zombie high school, a vampire-infested manor and crypt, a slaughterhouse, a house on the bayou, the streets of Whitechapel haunted by the crimes of Jack the Ripper, a creepy corn maze, and a village that has been overcome by a pumpkin curse. Each one has high points, and each one probably takes about 20 minutes to explore.
They are also surprisingly gory. The other thing I had assumed about the Worlds of Fun event was that it would probably be bowdlerized. “Family friendly.” But these haunts were every bit as grisly as any I have attended, with the slaughterhouse, in particular, giving the most gruesome a run for its money.
This is less a sales pitch for the Halloween Haunt at Worlds of Fun – already an extremely popular Halloween staple here in Kansas City – than it is an opportunity for me to admit when I’m wrong. I had always overlooked this particular venture, in spite of my fondness for haunted attractions, and when I finally went, I had a blast.
It’s always nice when things work out that way…
