The Dark Rows Review (2020)

The Dark Rows Haunted Trail has a passionate cast of volunteers that just love to scare. A wide variety of spooky and whimsical characters from Red Riding Hood and monkeys to the bearded lady make each scene very different from the last.

The actors have come up with some wonderful dialogue and actions exploring their characters. In certain scenes, the actors made it really believable that we were in the tents of a freak show set up within a cornfield. We especially loved the shopkeeper and his friends. Also, the magic act was a scream! The character that took our hearts the most was IT, played by 7-year-old Connor who was very enthusiastic about scaring the pants off of everyone.

The Dark Rows Haunted Trail is located inside Uncle Shucks Corn Maze and Pumpkin Patch. The information on their website made it easy to plan our trip and find the attraction. Our GPS took us directly to the dirt parking field. The ticket booth was well lit and easy to see. Once past that, heading across the open field to the corn and following it a bit to the right took us right to the entrance of the haunt. While it didn’t have any sort of well-lit sign, you could ask any of the friendly and well-marked staff for directions.

The trail itself has many well-staffed safety paths. Our visit was on a drizzling night with heavy overhead clouds, but the trail was still lit enough to be safe and easy to navigate. This made the dirt path a bit slick, but we felt it was quite safe for a cornfield. Watch out for the wooden bridges though, as they get very slippery when wet. While we suggest wearing real closed-toed shoes, rain or otherwise, we found the trail relatively easy to walk.

The Dark Rows Haunted Trail is a low tech haunt. With very little power to work with out in the cornfield, most effects are done by actors. The trail is lit by the moon, so your choice of when to see them largely changes how dark and spooky your experience is.

Between scenes, we very much enjoyed the long, winding paths through the cornfield that were empty and spooky all on their own. Sometimes less is more, and spreading out the scares works very well in this case. The scenes themselves are wonderfully decorated. In fact, we somewhat regretted that it was so dark on the night of our visit so we couldn’t see many of the details. Throughout the corn, there are small nuggets of special effects, like a bridge here and a lifesize jack in the box there. You never really knew what you’d see when turning a bend in the trail.

The Dark Rows Haunted Trail is a long haunted corn trail. The way the trail was cut was actually quite smart, with a central hub area as the actor and security zone, so that they can move seamlessly across the haunt quickly.

It took our group approximately fifteen minutes to walk the whole attraction and that was at a steady pace. With a ticket price of $20.00, this means that they have a minute per dollar ratio of 0.75 which is fairly average for a haunt. The ticket price also includes wagon rides, a bonfire, and other nighttime attractions within the Uncle Shucks part of the area.

The Dark Rows is always a fun stop in our month of haunts and we cannot wait to see what they have in store for us and other eager patrons in the following year. Additionally, our group always enjoys supporting charity haunts as they are doing what they love and making their community a better place at the same time.