As the air gets cooler and the days get shorter, mysterious things start to happen. Strange creatures emerge from the darkness, the still night fills with screams of terror...probably has something to do with the fact that all the haunted houses start to open for the season. The Midwest has some of the country's scariest, from schoolhouses haunted by the souls of the damned to post-apocalyptic scenarios rampant with bloodthirsty cannibals. For your twisted enjoyment, here are our favorite Midwest haunted houses for this Halloween:
The Burial Chamber lets you pick the scenario that scares you the most, whether it's the old-school zombie-themed Adrenaline Haunted House, the interactive insane asylum-themed Insanity Haunted House, the spine-tingling Phobia Haunted Woods tour or, perhaps the most terrifying of all, the "Last Ride Burial Simulator" which puts the brave into a real used coffin and makes you feel like you're being buried alive.
One of the scariest haunted houses in the country gets an extra dose of creepy from the legend surrounding the historic schoolhouse: it's hard to confirm or deny the tale that a janitor named Charlie murdered several students and stashed their bodies in the basement of the building during the 1950's, shortly before the school shut down for good. Either way, the formerly abandoned school definitely has a spooky vibe surrounding it, and the high-quality production they put on each year makes it a killer haunted house.
This haunted house will get you the most scare for your buck, since it's the World's Longest Walk-Through Haunted House. The aluminum foundry-turned horrifying attraction features over 3,700 feet of "terror-filled hallways, mazes, rooms and dilapidated factory chambers". That's 3/4 of a mile of scares-- definitely not for the faint of heart!
The dictionary definition of "erebus" is "the darkness beneath the Earth that the dead must pass to reach Hades", and as if that wasn't enough to scare you, then maybe something else in the huge, 4-story haunted house will leave you terrified. The concept behind the house is pretty mind-boggling as well-- I don't want to give too much away, but it involves an evil genius, time travel, bottomless pits, crushing walls, giant monsters, etc. etc.
You get to choose from 5 wild attractions, each more haunted and scream-worthy than the last. From the "sensory overload" of the glow-in-the-dark demented funhouse they call "Bedlam" to the Deliverance-type trail "Backwoods" to the horror fantasy "Nachtmahr" tour, you really can't go wrong choosing any of the haunted attractions they offer. Plus, if you need to burn off that adrenaline rush, try a game of zombie paintball!
The world is dead. Society has collapsed. Law and order have been replaced by chaos and survival. In the post-apocalyptic world of Necroplanet, you're faced with two options: enter Necropolis and face the zombie horde, or take on the marauding cannibals and their buckets of gore in The Pit. Either way, it's bound to be a hellish experience, and definitely not one for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.
This attraction has been going strong since 1975, although it's constantly being reworked to up the scare-factor. The tour through several floors of sheer fright ends with a 5-story slide descending to the depths of hell, right into the Devil's arms. Or, if you're more for a subtle kind of creepy, they also offer an attraction called "The Chambers of Edgar Allan Poe", which lets you live out some of the author's most twisted short stories like The Raven, The House of Usher, Rue Morgue, The Black Cat and more.
Three haunted tours here make up the Wisconsin Feargrounds "Trilogy of Terror". The first is the Morgan Manor, where the evil Morgana and her sisters will "feed on your fear". Then, if that didn't rattle you enough, head over to the Carn-Evil of Torment, where Morgana has an army of carnival freaks try to frighten you off, and if you survive that, move on to the grand finale-- Blackout, an endless nothing where guests are hooded "for their own protection". Too creepy.
