I was in Costco and happened across a Festival Fright Night at Winchester tickets for a quite reasonable price. We bought all of the add-ons and it was a blast. There are five or so different haunted house attractions complete with real people that you run into along the way. For example in one of the haunted house maze attractions we received a business card from a friendly entrepreneurial young man who seemed unfortunately dead but was continuing to sell embalming packages for needy customers.
But it didn’t stop with the haunted house attractions, there was tons of things to do including a fictional show about Harry Houdini, an interactive search for the secrets behind a missing child and a mean teacher (more below), a bar with a singer lingering in the 1920-1940s jazz club vibe, an animatronic singing band of ghoulish pumpkins and such, decorations and Hollywood smoke everywhere (ie not real smoke so no coughing involved), and great photo-ops around every turn.
We’d been to the Mystery House awhile back during the day and it was really a fun trip. The woman who owned it (related to the Winchester Rifle Co. fortune) was quite eccentric and built a house as big as a small city. With the highest attention to detail and quality, including Tiffany glass, the latest advancements in science, a seance rooms (or rooms), references to the occult everywhere, doors that lead right out of 2 story balconies, and much more. Touring it as a Halloween event just seemed like a potentially fantastic opportunity, and it definitely turned out that way.
I wish I could have taken photos from within various parts of the house during the haunted house attractions, but they don’t allow photos inside the attractions. We traveled through what seemed like most of the house, from the basement filled with pipes to bump you head on where they gave you a hard-hat to enter, all the way up to the attics of the various Gothic/Victorian steeples and spires. All-in-all the best haunted house experience I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine anything topping it for Halloween.
This real glow-in-the-dark tattoo has an interesting story around it. For our last exhibit of the night, just a couple minutes before closing time, we managed to get on the last exhibit that we had not done yet. It was an interactive live performance where you participate and solving a story involving finding lost children. The main suspect was a really mean teacher that was teaching us English in a tall spire attic of the house. She was a proper British matron with a ruler and wasn’t shy to use it.
The group that we were with were actually employees of the Mansion, and we had about 20 minutes to sit with them and one of the various worker meeting rooms of the estate. We had a great time chatting with them about the wild things that happened at the house and unexplained phenomenon there. The woman with the tattoo above was one of the workers there, and they all seemed to have acting experience so it was a fantastic group to be a part of as they too experienced the mystery of where all the children went with us right before we wrapped up for the night.
