The Trail of Nightmares Review (2024)

The cast was high-energy, high-impact, high-awesomeness. They made us feel threatened, intimidated, confused, scared, scorned, amused, and highly entertained! Many of the maniacs punctuated their performance with an effective silent stare-down or by calling out a final zinger after we had left their area. It was an interactive, engaging bunch that made it difficult to single out anyone – so we are just going to call out a whole lot of them here:

The tittering mad doctor asked if we enjoyed the screams of their bleeding victim and announced that everything up to that point had been an easy-to-swallow hors d’oeuvre to the dark maze leading out of the lab. In that maze, a cheerful creature asked for help finding its cat. We found it, all right …by accident while feeling around blindly on the walls, yuck. Dirty trick!

A possessed person snarled and whooped while crawling around on the walls. The witch commanded us trespassers to leave or get fed to spiders, then laughed wickedly. A couple of heavy metalhead psychos chased us around, acting crazy, screaming, and cutting off our escape routes. A crab walker and a phantom silently followed us. We got creeped out from a swamp lizard making a croaky rattle noise.

A diner waitress repeatedly told us to “straighten out your puckered-up poop shooter” and ordered us forward to go seek out daddy-brother and mama-cousin, noting that the family tree of their degenerate country clan went straight up and down with no branches! The crematory attendant/cook commanded us to jump up on the platform sliding into the furnace, declaring “it only hurts a lot,” and thanked us for visiting the family barbecue – where everybody gets cooked.

A cannibal clown, in tones suggesting an unholy marriage between Pennywsie and Heath Ledger’s Joker, moped that they were the only one in the funhouse since “the incident.” Turned out the incident was the clown eating everyone else because humans taste so much more flavorful than normal meat. Fair enough, cannibal clown, fair enough. Makes sense to us …um, maybe we’ve been doing this haunt reviewing thing too long?

The Trail of Nightmares exhibited flair and talent in outfitting and uglifying its characters. Outfits appeared bloodied, soiled, and overall fittingly distressed. Twisted, repulsive visages made us question our mental health in forging forward on this path. Nightmare fuel, for sure!

In the queue, we got attacked by a hook-nosed creep in a mechanic’s coveralls and a dreadlocked clown with disgusting hands in a jolly orange jumpsuit. The mad doctor wore a filthy lab coat and pushed-up-onto-forehead round specs. The witch clocked that classic look with a sharp nose and peaked hat. The metal maniacs had green hair and chalk white faces. The tarot reading mystic totally looked the part in a green dress, waist chain, and turban.

Notable masks included a rabbit in the inbred family area, something that looked like a lizard skull in the swamp, and a pumpkin-headed ax-wielder in overalls.

Some of the best costumes employed stilts for a spookily stately and striking appearance. A tattered pumpkinhead with an exposed rib cage, and some kind of goat-horned cult creature in a dark tunic, both impressed us mightily while looming above our heads.

This attraction is located in Ontario, Ohio, near Mansfield in the north central part of the state. We located the attraction without incident (which is more than we can say for the cannibal clown!). A lighted sign out front announced the place and very helpful, friendly attendants guided us into a free spot in a standard asphalt parking lot – the site is adjacent to a storage space facility.

The ticket booth, merch area, and attraction entrance were clearly indicated. We saw security personnel and police on site. Walking the trail did not present too many obstacles, other than the occasional root or knot that pops up on most any trail of this type.

The Trail of Nightmares maintains an active Facebook page and a basic website with online ticketing. If you don’t purchase tickets online, keep in mind the ticket booth takes cash only. ATMs are on site.

The entrance area resembled what it was, a somewhat nondescript commercial area that had been decorated with a few props. The outside queue snaked around a row of storage cubes, but can also be moved partly inside if it’s raining. Screams and chainsaws echoed through the night.

Inside the attraction, the excellent actors, outstanding lighting effects, and enveloping sets built around super realistic cabins, shacks, and other structures effectively built a nightmarish horrorscape for us. Not to mention the starting point of the creepy woods as a base. Also, we met no other visitors on the trail – just the actors, so a good job had been done on crowd control.

The thing most working against immersion was a sense that it perhaps was not quite as far from civilization as imagined, as we witnessed lights from nearby residences and businesses as well as the queue area.

After exiting, we walked back to the parking area past the concessions stand and merch room. Do visit the concessions. We enjoyed creamy hot cocoa, an enormous walking taco with all the fixin’s, and a basket of hush puppies with a selection of several sauces and dips for our after-haunt midnight snack.

We heard more and better noises here than in most other trails we’ve visited this season – including bizarre music, heavy breathing, whispers, chanting, and some spastic metallic banging in the dark maze.

The structures here were beautifully constructed and rigorously detailed. The first little shack held a mannequin in an open toilet stall delivering a recorded telling of potty jokes. “There are two reasons why you shouldn’t drink toilet water: number one and number two!” was the one full gag we heard from the loop of standup material. The witch’s hut was reinforced by tree branches and decorated with Blair Witch-esque hanging stick totems on the exterior, while the inside contained a cauldron, a cage with a human prisoner, and potions and other magical items.

The cult enclosure had glowing red runes etched near the top of its high fencing. The heavy metal barn shocked our senses with blaring music, a white interior, bright white strobes, and semi-mazey design. The wayward church wowed us with luminescent stained glass windows. A cemetery followed with an impressive tableau of caskets and gravestones, all in the middle of a storm simulation, then crypts and a crematory where a burned carcass shot out from the fire.

In two of the best sets, an abandoned ambulance emitted crackly emergency dispatches and dimly lit a disquieting crowd of mannequins with its flashing siren and blinking headlights. A mine shaft led to a cave environment with a swirling laser swamp and a sick dragon skull animatronic.

The ambulance lights and heavy metal strobes comprised parts of an overall superb lighting effort. As another example, the designers strung throughout the trail a series of those round hanging lights that look like upside down dish covers. They came in different colors and intensities, and some of them flickered ominously. It gave a sinister summer camp horror film feel to the proceedings.

This place really knows how to establish mood, create tension, and manage space, light, and shadow to pay off in terrific scares.

Props, sets, effects, and actors all worked together to bring off fright after fright. The doors of the church closed seemingly on their own behind us, a fantastically creepy touch that greased the wheels for a super charged reveal further in. The crematory cook materialized in front of us out of a blast of smoke from the furnace. The lighting mastery noted in the Special Effects section was further borne out by two heart-stopping moments that relied on knowing when to turn the lights *off*. An air cannon capped off the dark maze with a boom.

The amusing bathroom joke teller pulled our attention while a sneaky actor popped in for the kill. A hidden specter and backward crab walker concealed themselves among some mannequins, appeared seemingly out of nowhere behind us, and then slowly and silently followed us. The crazed metalheads climbed on the walls and jumped all over the place while shrieking and gibbering, and threw themselves in our way to stop our progress.

More scares came our way by way of a chainsaw lunatic jumping up on top of a tall mound of debris and then jumping down off of it right to land right in front of us. A hidden freak slithered its way to us in the swamp and clowns stalked us in the carnival area and funhouse, which also contained a couple of nasty environmental surprises.

It was a concerted group effort from a team focused on engineering scares out of expertly executed haunt elements. These folks understand how to set up, stage, and deliver genuine sparks of unease and panic. In fact, some of their scare scenes have been in place for all three of our review visits and they’ve managed to make little tweaks that still have us jumping and skittish. Hats off for keeping those scares coming!