House in Haunted Hill Review (2020)

The entire cast is made up of loyal friends and family just looking to have a great October. Surprisingly, I didn’t see any of them out of position when I entered their scenes. I can imagine some of these nights are a little slow and it becomes really difficult to stay in character and in place waiting for the next group.

There was a rather wide variety of characters at this attraction too. I wasn’t expecting to see everything from clowns to werewolves to creepy, Japanese ghosts! A lot of sets were made in a way that almost any type of scare actor could pair well with it, like a witch next to a Christmas tree next to a quad runner. Although there were some areas that were made for specific actors. They had Samara, or as she’s known to normal boring people, ‘the creepy girl from the Ring’, crawling out of a big-screen television and creeping her way toward us. There was a clown character hanging out with a bunch of clown masks and suits and toys all over the walls. I bumped into a great werewolf character that seemed to make sense around a cool swamp area.

The entire cast was always dressed appropriately for their characters. I was again very impressed to see such dedication for such a small place. There were even characters who changed costumes multiple times during the evening. One actor was a scary werewolf with a big coat of fur when I walked through the beginning. Towards the end of the trail there he was again but not as a glow in the dark skeleton! I could tell it was the same actor because the only part of the costume that didn’t change was his gloves. The gloves were so unique to this haunt because he custom made them by taking regular monster gloves and sticking the fingers into the upper halves of lobster claws! He even painted a little neon strip on the tops of the claws so they glow a bit in the black lights. But the sound they made when they clink together was so much creepier that all the other nail clicking gloves i’ve seen.

One other costume that stood out to me was a strange custom made one. The best way I could describe it is to picture a small dragon skull hanging off the edge of a pile of different colored buffalo fur coats (why buffalo? I don’t know). I liked this concept because it was unique and yet I could see it becoming a type of creature people talk about. Almost like something you’d hear stories about from people who go hunting in the deepest parts of the woods. It caught me off guard because I’m never looking for a pile of stuff to come at me.

Pretty much everyone was in a full face scare mask with a face mask underneath. Quite a few of them were custom made too, or at least altered. One of the characters looked like they were dressed in a business suit but had a devil’s face made out of Great Stuff insulation foam. Picture the devil with fifty bee stings to the face, horns were in good shape though. At first, I thought it was a devil melting but I guess either way is creepy. The glossiness of it shining in the colored lights worked very well.

Earlier in the day, I was traveling around the area not fully knowing where exactly House In Haunted Hill actually was. I wasn’t looking for it at the time because I was so sure it was much further away from where I was. Through the scenic and majestic backroads of New Hampshire, I was surprised to randomly pass by what looked like a crazy Halloween addict’s house. Not only were their trees completely wrapped in spider webs and fun zombie props coming out of the grounds, but I could see multiple tents and trailers and campers all covered in beat-up tarps. There were multiple types of skeletons and hanging things all over the driveway but I couldn’t tell if they were just thrown all over the place and left there all year or if that was part of the charm. I pulled over and got out to take a closer look thinking I had just stumbled upon a home haunt I have never heard of and therefore completely isolated from the New England Haunt community. No one was in sight but I walked up to what seemed like a small sketchy ticket booth with all of these ‘No smoking’ ‘Security cameras in use’ and even some fun Halloween warning signs like a witch on a broomstick ‘Share the Road’ sign. Then I noticed a small wooden plank on its side with some letters carved out. I tilted my head to the side and read ‘House In Haunted Hill’ ‘ I had completely miscalculated where I was and was blown away by what I was seeing because I was not expecting anything like this.

After dark, I drove back and I noticed they set up a few road signs to help people know when they are getting close. House In Haunted Hill doesn’t have a parking lot but the town allows visitors to park on the side of the road. It’s not a very busy road but it is the main route for many people in the area. And it is also very dark and somewhat secluded, passer-bys usually have to slow down to a stop just because they’ve been driving on a dark road for twenty minutes, and then all of the sudden the bright gates of hell are on your right. The road signs are very hard to miss when your headlights are bouncing off these bright neon purple squares in the middle of nowhere. They read ‘House in Haunted Hill 100 feet on the right’ shortly followed by another one ‘You are here at the House in Haunted Hill, Roadside Parking, Have Fun’.

The ticket booth now had two very nice ladies working inside and they were just having a blast. I don’t even know what was so much fun for them but the second I saw them they were just cheery and happy and greeting everyone like they knew them and was so excited to see them again. I had no reason to think they didn’t know each other, especially in a small town like this, so I figured that was the case. And then I walked up and I was treated no differently. I felt like I was suddenly family with these people.

Inside the actual haunt, there was really nothing dangerous at all. This is basically the cleared out forest of a man’s backyard. I figured there would at least be plenty of tree roots to look out for but everything was dug out and ground down so the ground is nice a flat. There were barely even any small hills to go up or down, one little one at the end but that’s it. Very safe environment.

Looking down into the driveway of the house I could see that this was a crazy mix of generic Halloween decorations and old rustic junkyard … stuff. Like two typical cheap skeletons sitting on a couch that hasn’t made its way into the dumpster. Although it could have been a knocked over refrigerator with the backs of two lawn chairs duct-taped to it. Next to them, there was a ghoul mask and some creepy hands popping out of a stack of used tires. Next to that a workbench that had equally the amount of tools and metal scrap pieces as it did jack-o-lantern buckets and body parts.

The haunt surrounds the owner’s house completely. There is one main entrance through the giant homemade monster mouth which they tell me used to be the head of a spider prop. The thought of a giant spider is crazy scary enough, but this thing looked like Cookie Monster with razor-sharp teeth addicted to flesh instead of cookies and that might be the scariest thing I’ve ever thought. What could possibly be seen from outside the house looks like a never-ending maze of stockade fence and trailers and tents and it really made me wonder what I was in for because this was some sketchy looking stuff to an outsider.

Probably the most notable thing people see when driving by is the spider-webbed trees in the front. At first sight I kind of thought it was a cool unique trail in between tall spiderwebs. I found out later that all the trees the spider webs were wrapped around were dug up from somewhere else and then ‘planted’ 3 feet deep into the ground at this haunt! Must have been about twenty of them! That’s dedication!

I was very impressed with the amount of lighting and the proper positions they placed them in. Each set had its own color scheme. The hillbilly kitchen had a pale red light, the swamp had a vibrant green, strobe lights in the checkerboard print walls. Some sets were just a crazy madhouse of stuff, so the lighting wasn’t any different when I walked in and they had old club lighting effects. Like the spinning color light balls and light coming from creepy doll heads that glowed red. They do have a lot of black light though, it seemed to be in most of the attractions but very rarely the only light in a scene. Just something to help everything glow a little better. In the actual outdoor sections of the haunt, they had string lights in orange and purple, and green depending on which scene I went through.

For a home haunt, this place had a great number of fake doors for actors to pop out of. Seemed to me like every other scene there was a fake wall that an actor could hide behind. They even had some walls that actually caved in and almost fell on me! But completely safe, it was all part of the haunt. They even had a great drop panel made out of tin that I found pleasant in a weird way. Many haunts will have these where an actor stands behind a painting or some framed image on the wall and waits for the guests to walk by. At which point they pull a latch and down drops the image right next to the guests who get a jump just from the sound of the wood smashing against more wood and the actor who is then only a foot away. They obviously can’t get that close this year but the sound of the tin hitting another piece of metal was a very different sound and it worked great.

It was obvious that these guys have put in a tremendous amount of hard labor into this place. They have a set where I walked over a man-made swamp. The rickety bridge and the twenty by twenty-foot hole they dug were all done by hand. They are even working on something that is going to look sick! Halfway through the haunt, I crossed over a long bridge that hopefully next year you’ll be able to see a giant crew of skeletons digging a long trench into the woods. Some of them were in place this year but no lights on them. Even from the little bit I could see I was blown away. But the most impressive thing I saw at House In Haunted Hill was what many would see as just a hole in the ground. At a closer look I saw that it was actually a six-foot-wide tree stump ground down to the surface of the ground and then someway somehow they dug out a hole INTO the Stump! Enough so that an actor could crawl up out of it. And in the very next room, they had a little mine shaft entrance where an actor pops out of. Turns out it can be the same actor as the one in the ‘Tree Well’ because they DUG A TUNNEL Underground from beneath the tree roots and up into the mineshaft! I’ve seen some insane jobs done at haunted attractions but this one is easily going into my top five labor of love projects.

If there was to be a ‘theme’ per se, I suppose it would just be a crazy world of Halloween Hoarding. They never flat out admitted it to me or wrote it down on any media, but I think it’s pretty obvious that I entered a world of a crazy horror enthusiast’s collection of cherished junk turned into an awesome display for people to admire.

All the custom made drawings and paintings of scary faces on the walls mixed with rusted tractors and gas cans and work tables made it all seem like an organized wasteland of sorts. One thing for sure is that when I entered the mouth of that insane looking spider head I felt like I had transported into a world I could not escape from by turning back.

I had no idea what to expect when I arrived. And it feels like if I went back tonight I would be a fool to expect anything to be the same. The characters changed costumes and the positions changed constantly and there is no way I could have seen everything in one night. There were just so many different things hanging and scattered all over that were not as random as people might think. They even had to point out a wooden plank with a bunch of old shoes nailed to it. Seemed like an incredibly random thing until they said, ‘Welcome to the room of souls’ ‘ get it? I chuckled for a second and then an Alien came out of nowhere trying to swipe at me. And that’s just how it is at House In Haunted Hill. Maybe there was a little bit of eeriness in the seclusion of this place to an outsider.

Tickets to House in Haunted Hill are just $10. The walkthrough took me close to 21 minutes giving this fun home haunt a Minutes per dollar value of 2.1 which is very high compared to most haunts around the country, so you’ll definitely be getting more than your money’s worth.

At the end of the haunt, they have a big function tent set up with T-shirts and cotton candy, hotdogs, beverages, popcorn, and all kinds of stuff. I was very impressed with everything they offered for that ticket price. And they made me feel like family the moment they saw me which is what this season can be all about.

A lot of the proceeds go back into the town’s boys and girls club Thanksgiving fund and Christmas fund, also the Franklin NH Animal Shelter and a few other charities that benefit the community. It’s so heartwarming to see a lot of the big-name attractions all over the country donating what they can to their communities. And when I see a small home haunt doing everything they can as well to help it just reminds me how magical this community of haunters is. Check out House In Haunted Hill for a great night!