What was this we saw before us? A set from a black and white sheriffs versus gunslingers ‘n’ outlaws TV show? A town where Clint Eastwood kicked in the saloon doors and blasted down an adversary in a spaghetti western?
Well, not exactly, but kind of close. The venue is Cowboy Creek Lodge, listed on Airbnb and formerly the Stagecoach Stop, an old (60s/70s era) roadside attraction with old west town flavor. Now, it’s also the setting for Haunting in the Hills.
The attraction hosts events like movie screenings and celebrity appearances throughout the year, then transforms into a full-blown multi-attraction haunt for the October spooky season. This year, the attractions are Mutant Escape Massacre, a hayride through woeful wastelands; Train Car of Terror, a love poem to horror movies set on, yes, an actual part of a train; and After the Flesh, a house of psychos, monsters, and freaks that are indeed after the flesh – yours!
We found Haunting in the Hills to be an appealing mash-up of genres and styles, old-school aesthetic with flashes of hi-tech sorcery, classic creepy comfort food shot through with innovative touches.
Total overall scores for each attraction –
Mutant Escape Massacre: 7.44
Train Car of Terror: 8.12
After the Flesh: 8.36
Haunting in the Hills’ acting troupe performed their parts with relish. Aside from a few silent menaces, the vast majority were loud and demonstrative. We had no trouble hearing what these psychos planned on doing to us. There were energetic screamers, yellers, taunters, drummers, barrel-bashers, and electric sparkers. Everybody in the cast wanted to make their mark, and most of them hit it.
Hayride: Right out the gate, we picked up a trio of hitchers riding on the wagon. They kept up a running commentary on what (okay, who) they had in mind for the evening’s menu, that being long pig. As fans of Hannibal know, long pig refers to the flesh of ye olde homo sapiens. One of them, a character seemingly out of a Mad Max movie, climbed all over the metal framework on the sides of the wagon and even crawled onto the roof!
Continuing the awesome gymnastics exhibition, a daredevil thrillingly buzzed over the wagon on a zip line. Leatherface was an inhuman tornado spinning around with a roaring saw in hand. These folks were physical! And in a most shocking scene, a wannabe auto mechanic performed a novel repair on their stalled car.
Train: Not as many freaks populated this shortest of the attractions, but the ones who appeared really made their presence felt. Art freaked us out big time, silently following us around and using various noisemakers to startle us several times. Another enthusiastic (but non-Art) clown seemed to be arguing internally – “Oh, new victims!” “No doctor, they’re patients, not victims, doctors don’t do any harm.” “Aaaaahhhhh, let’s get crazy!!” A demented chainsawer had us scrambling for the exit.
House: A starvin’ Marvin forced us into the smoke house with a crazed “‘C’mon fresh ham, get in the smoker!” and then wanted a taste after we’d gone through. And don’t you know it, more chainsaw nuts showed up doing their maniacal thing. Yeah, they served up a steady diet of chainsaw here.
Befitting the old-school aesthetic, Haunting in the Hills outfitted its creatures in fairly basic but effective get-ups. For faces, it was mostly good, solid makeup jobs, including some skillfully applied airbrushing, augmented by a few cool masks. Bodies featured a lot of grungy street clothes plus some specialized looks like a butcher apron and a scientist jacket, all of it mussed up with distressing, dirt, blood, and the like. Best looks in each attraction –
Hayride: The Road Warrior/Fury Road Hulk with spiky shoulder pads and a gas mask, and the dashing figure cut by the caped zip liner.
Train: Tie between Art the Clown, who looked quite Art-ful, and the other clown, who bounced around in white hair and a white lab coat.
House: Hands down the weirdest look in the place, an attacker came at us wearing a full-sized TV on its head! That’s gotta be a first for us.
Haunting in the Hills is located in Onsted, Michigan, about an hour southwest of Detroit. It was already easy to find by GPS, but the extra big, extra bright sign just made it that much more so.
We found plenty of free parking on dirt and gravel, as well as nice folks all around: in the ticket office, driving the wagon, and acting as door persons.
The information available beforehand on Facebook was a little thinner than we’re used to – but the website is under construction, so it should improve when that’s operational.
We got around the grounds just fine. It was kind of hilly, which should be expected as it’s right there in the name. We negotiated some stairs, ramps, and low ceilings, but nothing seemed too bad. The worst bit involved a descent in low lighting on the way to the train, but we took our time, and it turned out fine.
Our final note here is that it’s an honest-to-goodness joy to find an attraction with real bathrooms!
The place permeated a great atmosphere. A hearse sat parked beneath the huge attraction sign. Music filled the night air. Towering skeletons stood guard over the ticket booth, and colored flood lights bathed the buildings in eerie shades.
The train had the best lead-in as it was set apart from the rest and had giant skellys and props, a cemetery, a fire pit, and a very cool escape room facade to go with the lit-up train car. The other two attractions benefited from their proximity to the spooky western village.
Inside, we found more good immersion forged by lots of sets and props to look at, actors energetically engaging us, and great overall design chops that resulted in pleasingly layered, sequenced, and transitioned scenes.
Hayride: The wagon twice rolled under colorful lighted arches. Multiple pyro blasts took us by surprise. A couple of scenes made fantastic use of a vibrational sensory effect.
We went past a skeleton horse-drawn carriage with skeleton riders and an awesome-looking cemetery. But the most impressive set featured a crowd of sunglasses-wearing skeletons watching a show in a large amphitheater.
Train: Organ music set a theatrical tone as we ventured past skulls and goalie masks affixed to wooden fencing, on our way to the cabin’s door and the sinister cinematic superstars within.
Extremely narrow passages led to filmic phantoms in quick succession: the Saw room with Billy in a bathtub, a Terrifier room, a Leatherface room, Freddy’s furnace room with strobing and fog, a Hellraiser room with Pinhead prop, puzzle boxes, and dangling chains, and the Exorcist room featuring freaky possessed dummies.
Outside, we found Sam from Trick ‘r Treat, melonheads, and a palette leading to an It area. This was the shortest attraction, but it was positively packed with props like a fabulous witch animatronic with voice recordings and animated eyes, a glittery winged pig, a mini-clown, a bubble blower device, and a huge spider.
House: After the Flesh featured the best sounds, including creepy keyboard music, ringing bells, recorded voice-over craziness, and Tiptoe through the Tulips playing in the toy store.
We weaved in and out of buildings and through a room of mannequins and body parts, stacks of luminescent barrels, a tiny but marvelous chamber with pinpoint laser lights, a glowing skull in a wheelchair, and a spinning, glowing skull with hoses attached. Weird and wonderful stuff!
Two of the best sets were the smoke house filled with blinding fog and a woodsy burning smell, and an unsettling hallway of doors. Quite plain, but also disquieting. We knew there had to be something dreadful behind at least one of those doors …and unfortunately, we were right.
21. How scary was it? (35% of score): 7.5
22. How well did they provide scares to everyone in the group? (15% of score): 8.57
23. How predictable were the scares? (25% of score): 8.07
24. How well did they provide a wide variety (types) of scares? (10% of score): 7.63
25. How strong was the ending / finale? (15% of score): 8.13
Hayride: This attraction was the least scary, as hayrides usually tend to be, but still managed some good startles.
An unseen drummer in the woods getting off one loud strike right behind our heads, unexpected blasts of fire, Leatherface going absolutely crazy, and the extra sensory effects described in the Special FX section turned out to be the best of the bunch.
Train: Tight corridors ideal for ambushes ratcheted the tension, which was paid off by actors and animatronics. Hideous props and dummies had us recoiling and cringing. Art got us good several times, and kudos to the final actor for a solid chainsaw ending. Between claustrophobia, spiders, and other big predators, clowns, and the familiar terrors and trappings of our favorite scary movies, this choo-choo ride had us tied to the tracks of a whole range of phobias.
House: The most active attraction by far, there was a point midway through with multiple actors confronting us one after the other, scene after scene, that just got crazy and hectic in an anxiety-pumping way.
They banged on barrels, threatened us with sparking sticks, and screamed their damn heads off. We all know “Get out!” should be retired from the vocabulary – but after hearing one actor shrieking this in capital letters over and over in an utterly convincing manner, we think maybe an exception here and there could be made. Not one, but two chainsaw chases sealed things away in frantic fashion.
We rode for 12 minutes on the hayride, steamed through the train in 8 minutes, and survived the house in 10 minutes, for a total of 30 minutes. Combo tickets go for $40 ($5 less than buying each attraction separately).
That makes for an MPD (minutes per dollar) ratio of 0.75. It’s not quite the 1.0 we use as a benchmark, but not too far off the mark.
While that MPD is lower than most other attractions we see on a regular basis, we will note it is roughly in line with others in the Detroit area. So, you can look at it as being approximately the market value for the region.
When gauging the value, we must also judge whether it was scary, fun, etc. And from that perspective, we have to say there was just something about the place that we enjoyed very much.
It somehow added up to more than the sum of its parts, which in themselves were quite good: the western movie look, spooky in-the-sticks atmosphere, moody lighting, game actors, the seemingly old school set-up intriguingly sprinkled with high-tech effects, all put together with sparks of ingenuity and creativity.
How’s this for unique? On Sundays, you can do the hayride as a DIY drive-through in your own car – load up everybody for a rate of $30 per carload. Good for kiddos because they can keep the windows rolled up, keeping the actors at bay. In May, Haunting in the Hills co-presents a haunted attraction at Ann Arbor’s Halfway to Halloween Expo along with a host of other Detroit-area haunts; keep an eye out on social media for that one.
So, is Haunting in the Hills worth it? Yes indeed, your prospects are good for finding haunt gold in them thar hills.
7203 U.S. Hwy 12, Onsted, Michigan 49265
