When visiting any business website, you should be able to find the basic information with as little effort as possible. The more work a business makes their customers do, the more chance of losing those customers. With that in mind, I created an A.I. agent to use on my Doing Des Moines project to help evaluate restaurant websites. I then decided it could also be helpful for haunted house websites. The goal is simple:
How many clicks (effort) does it take to find the most very basic “required info” for an attraction?
- Where is it (location)
- When is it (dates and times)
- How much is it (ticket cost)
There are other things being scanned too (like parking fees, which one attraction has but it wasn’t on their website initially — surprising families that went out to see it), but for now, just the most important things will be considered. And now the robot goes to work…
Scope: your 7 main Des Moines haunts — The Docks, Future Nightmares, Carlisle Haunted Woods, Linn’s, Slaughterhouse, Sleepy Hollow, and Zombie Hollow — on their official websites only.
Method: start at each homepage and count clicks to each answer (homepage itself = 0). The three scored questions are Where, When, and How Much; What and Who get noted as useful extras. A price that only appears inside a ticket-checkout flow counts with all its clicks, and anything missing or Facebook-only gets flagged as not found rather than guessed.
Three checks are running in parallel now, and when they report back I’ll stack the sites up into one comparison — fewest total clicks to all three core answers wins, with missing answers called out separately so a site can’t win by hiding a question.
A minute or so later, results began coming in:
First audit batch is back — Sleepy Hollow and Zombie Hollow. The other five sites are still being checked, so here’s the interim picture:
Sleepy Hollow Scream Park — core three in 3 clicks total, all on one page
- Where: 1 click — Need to Know page, “4051 Dean Ave, Des Moines”
- When: 1 click — same page: Oct 9-10, 16-17, 23-25, 29-31; gates 7pm, admission stops 11pm Fri/Sat, 9pm Thu/Sun, closes midnight
- How much: 1 click — same page: $32/$30 park pass, $48/$45 VIP
- What: 0 clicks — homepage describes the haunts
- Who: not found anywhere — no operator or company named on the site at all
- Friction: only a dismissible cookie banner; prices visible without entering checkout
Zombie Hollow — core three in 3 clicks total, but with a catch
- Where: 0 clicks — homepage footer, “2310 Saint Charles Rd, Winterset”
- When: 1 click — About page: Friday/Saturday nights from Oct 9, daytime walks Sat/Sun 11am–4pm
- How much: 2 clicks — only on the external FearTicket vendor page, nowhere on the main site ($18 night adult, $12 daytime adult, $12/$8 kids)
- What: 1 click — About page
- Who: 1 click — Visit page: “Founder: Lew Jordan”
- Friction: the ticket vendor page first loaded as a stuck black “Loading…” screen before rendering — a real first-visit stumble — and the About page lives at a mislabeled /services/ URL
So on raw clicks they’re tied at 3, but Sleepy Hollow wins on quality: all three answers on one of its own pages, versus Zombie Hollow forcing visitors off-site to learn the price. Full seven-site comparison once the rest report in.
…and then it continued on…
Second batch is in — and it produced both the best and the worst site so far. Just the Docks, Future Nightmares, and Haunted Woods left to check.
Linn’s Haunted House — a perfect score: all five answers, 0 clicks
- Where, When, How much, What, and Who are all right on the homepage: basement of Linn’s Supermarket, 3805 6th Ave; the remaining 2026 dates with hours (7pm–midnight Fri/Sat, 7–10pm Sun/Thu); $25 at the door, cash preferred but cards accepted; and Merlyn Linn’s story, with the family carrying it on. Even a live “Are we open?” widget in the sidebar. No popups, no hunting. This is the standard the others should be measured against.
Slaughterhouse — the hardest site so far: 7 clicks for the core three
- Where: 1 click — Contact page only, not the homepage
- When: 3 clicks — and only inside the HauntPay ticket flow (homepage → “Get Tix” → dates → pick a night for time slots). The homepage’s “2026 Official Calendar” is just an image with no readable text
- How much: 3 clicks — again only in the ticket flow ($35 GA / $45 VIP for Saturday); no prices anywhere on their own site
- What: 1 click — but only via the ticket page (“Cannibal Bayou”); their own nav labels are thematic and misleading (“The Haunt” pushes a speakeasy event instead)
- Who: not found — the only names on the site are fictional lore characters (the Biggs family)
Running standings on core-three clicks: Linn’s 0, Sleepy Hollow 3, Zombie Hollow 3, Slaughterhouse 7.
This is exactly the type of information I was wanting to see. Finally…
The Results
All seven audits are done. Here’s how they stack up, ranked by total clicks to answer the three core questions (Where + When + How Much):
🥇 Tied at 0 clicks — everything on the homepage
- Linn’s — 0/0/0, and the only site with all five questions answered at 0 clicks, including Who (Merlyn Linn’s story) and a live “Are we open?” widget. The gold standard.
- The Docks — 0/0/0 ($25 GA / $45 fast pass, Oct 9–31 Fri–Sat 7:30–11pm, 97 Indiana Ave). Who is only implied via the Barnum name and email, 1 click.
- Future Nightmares — 0/0/0 on paper, with an asterisk: dates, times, and prices live inside an embedded ticket widget and stay hidden until you pick a date in its dropdown. Still 0 clicks, but it’s an interaction, not plain text — and the homepage is cluttered with repeated blocks and warnings.
Tied at 3 clicks
- Sleepy Hollow — 1/1/1, and all three answers sit together on one Need to Know page. Clean, but Who is missing entirely — no operator named anywhere.
- Zombie Hollow — 0/1/2, but the price exists only on the external FearTicket vendor page, nowhere on their own site — and that vendor page first loaded as a stuck black spinner. Who is named, though: founder Lew Jordan.
Incomplete
- Carlisle Haunted Woods — Where 0, When 0–1, but no general admission price anywhere on the site — no ticket page at all. The only price fragments are a 25%-off group discount (off an unstated base price) and a $10 student night. Who is also missing; the only person named is a contact, “Marilyn.” Bonus quirks: the schedule is partly an image, and the Schedule page’s browser title still says “2023.”
Last place: 7 clicks
- Slaughterhouse — 1/3/3. Their own site contains zero practical visitor info: no address, hours, or prices on any of its pages. Everything factual lives behind “Get Tix” on HauntPay, the nav labels are thematic misdirection (“The Haunt” pushes a speakeasy event), and the homepage calendar is an image with no readable text. Who is missing too — the only names are fictional lore characters.
The pattern in one line: the best sites answer everything on the homepage (Linn’s, Docks); the worst sites are posters that outsource the facts to a ticket vendor (Slaughterhouse, Zombie Hollow’s price, Future Nightmares’ widget). And three of the seven never name a real human behind the haunt: Sleepy Hollow, Slaughterhouse, and Carlisle.
Want me to save this comparison as a document you can revisit or share, or is chat enough for now?
But wait … Haunted Woods does have a price listed, but it is embedded in a graphic, making it invisible to search engines (and maybe anyone using a screen reader, I suppose). This made the agent add an extra note:
The earlier audit only counted selectable text, so a price baked into an image would have been missed. Carlisle’s price moves from “not found” to “found on the homepage, but image-only” — which still matters, since image text can’t be searched, copied, or read by screen readers.
And if you allow non-searchable data for pricing (assuming most folks can see the graphic):
The homepage schedule flyer (“The Mare Witch Project V — October 2026 Schedule”) has a banner at the bottom reading “$20.00 Admission, Cash Only”— and that $20 is only in the image. It appears nowhere as regular text on the site; the only text price anywhere is the separate $10 student charity night.
So Carlisle’s updated scorecard:
- Where: 0 clicks
- When: 0–1 clicks
- How much: 0 clicks, but image-only — a visitor can see it, but can’t search it, copy it, or have a screen reader read it, and the text-only $10 student price could easily confuse someone into thinking that’s the regular price
- What: 0 clicks
- Who: still missing (only “Marilyn” as a contact)
That moves Carlisle out of the “incomplete” bucket and up the table on raw clicks — effectively tied near the top at 0–1 — but with the biggest asterisk in the comparison. Revised standings:
- 0 clicks: Linn’s, The Docks, Future Nightmares (widget asterisk)
- 0–1 clicks: Carlisle Haunted Woods (image-only price asterisk)
- 3 clicks: Sleepy Hollow, Zombie Hollow
- 7 clicks: Slaughterhouse
Thanks for catching that — it’s exactly the kind of thing a text-only check misses, and it’s a good lesson for the audit method: images count as “found,” but they deserve their own flag.
So there you have it. The best websites are the ones that are useful to customers without making them jump through hoops to find what they are looking for. Congratulations to the winners:
- Linn’s Haunted House
- The Docks
- Future Nightmares*
- Haunted Woods
Then if you want to do three times as much work to find the basic info:
- Sleepy Hollow Scream Park
And in last place, requiring the most clicks just to find out Where, When and How much, we have:
- Slaughterhouse Haunted Attraction
Summary
If you sometimes wonder why I get some haunts listed up quickly, and others remain unpopulated until later, this is why. I just do this site for fun, and to hopefully help folks looking to find stuff to go to during Halloween season. But if it I cannot quickly and easily find the information, I have to push it back until I have time to sit down and “work” on it a bit.
Anyway, I am glad it wasn’t just me that thought it took more work on some sites. Maybe some year we can get all the haunts to just put the basic info right there on their front page.
Until then… I’ll (eventually) do that work and have it on my page. (I’d get a 2-click, I bet, since my home page goes to the news feed, then you have to click a menu and select Haunts 2006. Should I change the default? I used to go straight there, but no one was reading the updates I posted about the haunts, and I think it is important to know of a date change or closure.)