The Haunted Acres Review (2026)

This haunt has limited parking, so they’ve developed a rather ingenious way to control traffic flow. Guests will buy their tickets online, and they select a time when they do so. Arriving near the haunt, you’re directed by a pair of traffic attendants to a spot on the side of the road marked with your time slot, and you wait in your car for them to move you forward. When they give the go-ahead, you drive up the road and get an actual parking spot at the haunt. With that sort of timing, cars don’t build up, and they can manage even relatively high traffic nights without getting jammed up. It must be hell for them to manage, but for me it was easy and without confusion. I

had no problems getting information or finding things at all. I mentioned in the Summary that the haunt was fantastic for my daughter, but I need to highlight how truly kind they are. You can request a glow-in-the-dark necklace free of charge to mark you as someone who shouldn’t be targeted.

Beetlejuice welcomes you to the haunt and gets you ready to go inside. When he saw my daughter’s necklace, he asked if she’d ever been through a haunt before and answered her questions honestly and kindly. He was so great that after he left, she remarked: “I wish Beetlejuice could be with us for the whole haunt; he made me feel better.” Halfway through the haunt, he popped back out to ask her how it was going and to reassure her that she was already through the scariest part. I was grateful, albeit a little concerned, when it inspired her to say his name three times back at our house to try and summon him. There’s no reason to ask for trouble.

Maintaining immersion is a difficult magic trick to pull off, something that’s complicated and lost even when you have everything going for you in an old, abandoned prison or insane asylum. Managing to pull it off in your garage and wooded backyard is even harder. Haunted Acres doesn’t quite manage to pull it off, but I appreciated the amount of work they put in for their size.

While the sets are largely made from plywood and what looked like props from Amazon and Spirit Halloween, they go far out of their way to set up the story and their world. Guests are first brought into a small room to watch an intro movie setting up what is about to happen. The experiment that has gone wrong isn’t a throughline of everything that follows, but they touch back on it more than many much larger and more established haunts do in their own stories. It was a nice touch, and very much appreciated.

This is not a large haunt, nor does it have a great deal of tradition. You shouldn’t expect movie-grade props or effects here; it’s just not in the cards for a haunt this size. I appreciated what they were able to pull off with what they had. Some handmade animatronics were charmingly DIY and fun, albeit not very realistic, and some of their gags as you walk through are solid. I also appreciated the simplicity of a few of their tricks; putting a mirror in a dark, wooded area and having people startle themselves with their own motion is a great idea, and I’m not sure why more haunts aren’t doing it.

I thoroughly enjoyed the actors here in the haunt. I’d be willing to bet it was largely the owner’s family and maybe a few local teenagers, but they had energy and enthusiasm to spare. I need to call out one of the clowns that played hide and go seek with us; she was a lot of fun, and my daughter has told at least a dozen people how angry “the demon” got when my daughter spoiled her ambush of me. Costumes are passable if not overly elaborate, and the dim lighting almost hides the fact they don’t darken their faces under their masks. Some prosthetic stitches were well put on. I’m experienced enough to see the edges on them, but they were well enough done that my daughter marveled that she was so committed she’d have stitches on her face for the whole month. That’s a solid endorsement of their latex work. We didn’t get the most believable performances, but they committed wholeheartedly.

This wasn’t an especially scary haunt. I’m jaded, and I was traveling with a young girl wearing a “don’t target me” necklace, but even if they were giving it their all to terrorize me, I don’t think they’d have managed. They will scare some, though! They did make me jump once, which takes some genuine focus on the fundamentals because I’ve seen and done just about everything at this point. They also managed to lull me into a false sense of security; I was so sure I wasn’t going to be surprised at one point that they genuinely managed to surprise me. I won’t spoil it.

Don’t go to this haunt as an adult and expect serious thrills and chills. Go here with your family and have fun; let your kids get the benefit of a genuine, haunted attraction with a lot of heart and some degree of training wheels.