Back from Disney, and without our normal season passes to Lagoon, it was time to take a look at the local offerings.
However, I’m a little bit on the picky side when it comes to haunted houses. The typical ‘maze’ filled with a constant line of startle scares from teenagers who’s repertoire consists of screaming at the top of their lungs gets really old, really quick.
Most places around have also gone to the “Three haunts in one location” marketing gimmick as well. It really annoys me that they could do ONE really well, with a good story and progression…instead of 3 smaller ones with 3 lines to wait in…oh, and don’t forget that they can charge MORE because ‘there’s 3’.
So, we were looking for something a little left of center.
Enter This is the place Heritage Park.
They jumped onto my radar 2 years ago, when they released an ad for their theme revolving around a graverobber.
To the average person, this might seem a little strange, but I recognized it at once as the local legend of Jean Baptiste.
A strange case of the early LDS community branding and banishing this graverobber (some stories suggest necrophilia as well) to an island in the middle of the Great Salt Lake. Problem is, actual history is sketchy, because a lot of the official record managed to lose itself.
A skull found along the shores some 30 years later was attributed to him. Later a headless skeleton was found. Forensics of the day just chalked it up to Jean Baptiste.
I was all aboard for a haunt about a local ghoul, and I’d heard the place relied more on it’s telling a story and getting in your MIND than the traditional haunted house trickeries.
So, we made the trek to find they are doing witches this year.
Not a problem, I know of several local witch stories, and had studied the question of how to do witches originally myself.
They were splitting into groups of 30 to start with. Our group had our 5, a group with some VERY young kids (<5) and a bunch of teenage boys. We started the trip being shuffled in to watch the setup movie.
The movie did it’s job, and one of the boys was already freaking out, and being DRUG on by who I assume to be his dad. We were next shown into a marvelous chapel setup where a witch was about to perform some unholy ritual.
This was, quite literally, one of the best scenes I’ve seen in a haunt for 10 years or more, and I was hoping we would continue to go building to building to see little scenes of a similar nature…but, unfortunately, it turned more mundane for a stretch, as we were split into your typical ‘groups’ from this point on.
(brief hope the ‘safe color’ from The Village was going to be a continued theme)
The into building/back out nature from here was fogging my camera from this point as well, making things difficult, at best. The attempt to split our group up didn’t last long, as those little kids were slow in front of us, and the teenagers were rushing up behind us. Various rooms and scares later, we made it back to the acting with a couple wiches around a Ouija board. Alec, of course, jumped right up, as is his habit, and Jen asked it when he would die. This scene didn’t really ring great for me, as one of the ‘witches’ kept calling it nonsense, when they should have been driving home the doom and gloom, IMO.
Finally, you can’t have a witch’s haunt without the burning, which again played a little ‘off’ for me, as the rest of the haunt really played up what these witches were doing to the town, we suddenly were faced with this ‘witch’ in the gibbet begging for help. Spitting curses and revenge upon you as you ignore, swearing to come back and grab you in your sleep…something as a nice sendoff would have been nice…but then, we had lots of scared little-uns in the group at that point, and maybe she just decided to pitch the slow ball for their sake.
In the end, it was a really fun time to see a slightly different approach to the traditional haunts, and the fear level was about perfect for Talia. Enough to scare her a couple times, but not something that was going to haunt her dreams. But then, we’re not exactly a normal family, and the one teenager was practically beside himself from the get go.
