With Halloween coming to an end, I decided that going to a haunted house would be the perfect spooky season activity. I went to the notorious haunted attraction Field of Screams, located in Mountville, Pa., which will remain open until Nov. 11 . This attraction opens around 6:30 p.m. and all visitors must arrive by 9:00 p.m. since that is when the on-site ticket booth closes. Ticket prices for all four attractions are around $40, but if you decided to go on Nov. 10, the extreme blackout event, the price is $50 and the intensity of the attractions are increased. According to the official website, the blackout night is not recommended for those under the age of 18 years old. Field of Screams also has various events throughout the year for the different holidays.
This year, I went with two of my friends on Oct. 27, one of the busiest nights of the season. We preordered our tickets for the 7:00 p.m. time slot so we could go directly to the attractions. The first attraction that we did was the Nocturnal Wasteland. The Nocturnal Wasteland is an outdoor section where you walk through the woods and various structures. The main theme of this section is that there has been an apocalypse, and now, there are mutants and wild men that terrorize the land. In this section, you will see a lot of animatronics, live actors and even pyrotechnics.
The next section that we decided to go to was the Haunted Hayride. This has always been my favorite part of the Field of Screams experience because there are so many different themes in one small section. While waiting in the line to get onto the wagon, there was a DJ booth that played various types of music, and it tended to get very loud at times; however, the line did move relatively fast in this section due to the amount of people that could fit into the wagon at the same time. During the hayride, I also noticed that they added a new section since last year.
Once we finished with the hayride, we decided to get a quick snack and drink before getting in line for the next section. Out of the various little places for food and drink, we decided on going to Auntie Anne’s to get some pretzels and lemonade. The prices were quite high, but we were okay with paying for it since we were getting a bit hungry and thirsty at this point. After we got our snacks and drinks, we got in line to wait for the Asylum attraction.
The Asylum attraction took quite a while to get into since they only allow small groups to enter at once. Because they know that this attraction is relatively small and can only have small sections enter at a time, there is a platform near the queue that workers will go up on and do fire performances. In the Asylum section, you go up and down the four floors of the building where the storyline is that you are exploring an abandoned asylum for the criminally insane where some of the doctors and patients remain, waiting for more people to enter so that they can continue their experiments.
Finally, we went to the Den of Darkness section of Field of Screams. In this section, you explore the three-story building where the storyline is that the farmhouse’s ownership was passed to multiple people, each continuing the legacy of torture and murder that the original family started there. The line for this section was relatively short and moved decently fast.
Overall, I recommend going to Field of Screams if you are a fan of horror and like to go out for the Halloween season.
