Iowa-based haunted house information, since 2010. Posting haunted house videos since 2006.
Just in time for “Halloween Week,” Future Nightmares in Merle Hay Mall has added extra nights:
I will try to get the information on this website updated (as well as the calendar) as soon as I can. But, as always, check official sources before heading out. This year, at least three of the haunts have added or removed nights in the past week. Do not rely on what you see in a newspaper article or some Halloween nerd’s website. 😉
A new home haunt has been added to the index. Check it out! (I need to make a new category to differentiate this from the other haunted garage we have had listed.)
Linn’s Haunted House, which started in 1984, is the longest running haunted house around. The Des Moines Register‘s Paris Barraza posted an article about it today:
I have added these to the Linn’s page on this site (the one that shows up in the pull down menu at the top of the pages). There wasn’t a place for it on the index software so I have to keep a separate “launch page” for each haunt for things like this.
Always check with the haunt’s official website or social media before heading out. Dates sometimes get added or removed. Or both, in the case of Winterset’s Zombie Hollow. From their Facebook page:
We’ve switched up our calendar a bit. We took out Thursday the 26th but added Sunday the 29th. Friday night is looking dry and just right! Come on out, grab a hot chocolate at Nick’s Kettle Korn located right at our front entrance and carry it with you as you enjoy the show! By Tuesday, we may be adding Christmas lights if the snow keeps up! ????????????❄️
Zombie Hollow on Facebook
Barnum Circus of Freaks also posted about adding an extra night this week.
For outdoor events, weather may also be a concern, with rain expected today and a potential to see some snow this weekend. Carlisle’s Haunted Woods has posted about potentially changing hours due to weather. Outdoor events such as these (and Sleepy Hollow, and Adventureland, and Trail of Terror, and…) can be impacted by wet or color weather.
Wrap up warm this weekend!
I guess I should have seen this coming.
Shortly after launching this year’s haunted house awards voting, I started getting feedback questioning including Adventureland Phantom Fall Fest in with the small single haunted houses. I honestly thought of them no differently than Sleepy Hollow, which I believe has more haunted houses than Adventureland.
I genuinely expected the voting to be similar to previous years, with the huge multi-generational fanbase of Linn’s Haunted House and the nationally-known Slaughterhouse dominating most categories. But, shortly after the voting went live, it became clear that Adventureland – with its 151K+ Facebook followers – was going to wipe out all the other haunts.
I think we can all agree that if their haunts are better than all the others, they should win.
As a lifelong theme park nerd (see my Photos – Park Hopping site over 150,000 theme park photos going back to 1996), this reminds me of the Disney fans trying to compare Disneyland in California (back when it was just one theme park with one hotel) to Walt Disney World (which was four theme parks, tons of resorts, golf courses, waterparks, etc.). You could easily compare which version of Haunted Mansion you thought was better, but comparing “Disneyland to Walt Disney World” just never made any sense to me.
I have heard from several other haunt operators, folks who have worked for various haunts, and some haunt fans, and they all have valid points and good suggestions. Since we have already started the voting, nothing will change in the voting for this year, but we may have to rethink the categories.
Since Sleepy Hollow and Adventureland are both events with multiple haunted houses, perhaps there should be a category for “SCARIEST Multi-Haunt EVENT”. In the past, I used to break out all the individual haunted houses at Sleepy Hollow and let folks vote on them individually, rather than the event as whole, specifically for this reason (just on a much smaller scale).
I may regret not doing that this year. Perhaps that could be a solution, but even if that was done, it may still not be appropriate to compare an amusement park that has generations of fans going back to 1974 with a single haunted house.
Please keep the comments, Facebook messages and e-mails coming in. I hope we get at least 1000 votes this year (we are already at about 10% of that, so maybe it will be much more). The voting will remain open in to November, but once Thanksgiving/Christmas season kicks in, folks tend to check out. Maybe Thanksgiving will be the cutoff, or the end of November.
Onward!
This site began listing haunted houses in 2010. Before the site redo in 2010, I kept every previous year available to we could look back on what operated in previous years. I spent several hours tonight trying to get all of this data posted to this new site. Most of it I had, but I had to get one of the years from the Internet Wayback Machine 😉 (My old system I created was far better for archiving data than the modern and expensive one I use these days).
There is still a lot of cleanup to do, but I wanted to make this data available before Halloween. You can start with Year 2010 and take a look.
The awards were listed on the old site, but never got added to this new version. Until tonight. You can look back on the winners of various awards over the years by going here. (Linn’s Haunted House even still displays their’s inside their entrance, along with their Cityview award.)
As of today, my most-viewed photos on Google (going back many years) are haunted house photos I took last year. These photos show up in Google search results, maps, etc. Here is the current view count of what photos folks see:
I can understand there would be interest in ScareDSM (which was still new last year), and Slaughterhouse (since it’s the haunt that put Des Moines on the map for haunted houses when they did the Slipknot deal)… but Linn’s continues to come out on top, probably because it’s known by generations of Iowans that have visited it since the 1980s. (But I still giggle when I see how many views those wooden signs we made for the Saylorville Renaissance festival have been seen. I guess folks like wood.)
DISCLAIMER: These posts should not be taken as reviews. They should be taken as my interpretation of what the attraction is like. See “what is scary” for more details.
The official title of this haunted house, according to their Facebook page, is:
Barnum Circus of Freaks: A Haunted House Experience
Their website describes it as follows:
“Prepare to be mesmerized, horrified, and utterly captivated by the twisted and the bizarre. From spine-tingling spectacles to jaw-dropping curiosities, our haunted attraction is a chilling journey through the macabre. Dare to witness the eerie, the unsettling, and the supernatural as you navigate through darkened corridors and shadowy chambers. With every creak of the floorboards and every flicker of candlelight, you’ll find yourself immersed in a realm where the normal is anything but.”
https://www.barnumcircusoffreaks.com
This doesn’t really describe what is inside this nearly 12,000 square foot maze of rooms, passages and total darkness. I’d call it a “twisted creepy sideshow funhouse” but that doesn’t look as good on a sign.
When we arrived on Saturday evening, there did not seem to be many folks in line. We learned they use a timed ticket system where visitors will get a text message when it is their time to enter. If the weather is bad, folks can wait in their car. If you drive by and say “oh look, there’s no line!” you may be disappointed to find you still have a wait.
During the time I was there, the courtyard filled up as folks gathered to watch Sabba Circle, a fire show. Fire shows seem to be popular at area haunts — I’ve seen them at at a few other haunts in the area.
I suppose this gives folks an incentive to hang around and get a snack at the Kool’s Sweets & Treats food tent. The food included circus fair such as cotton candy, funnel cakes and hot dogs. There is also a photo backdrop featuring a circus wagon.
When it is your turn, you walk up a long ramp to a doorway. A “circus performer” bursting with happy enthusiasm will welcome you inside. From there, you go from room to room, either through openings, doors, slitted plastic or large flaps. Sometimes you are in a completely dark hallway where your pace becomes very slow as you navigate the twists and turns waiting for something to jump out at you. Other times, you cross through open rooms with barriers keeping you on one side. You later discover than your path will take you through the other side of the same room. Sometimes you encounter other groups heading in the opposite direction, and wonder if they are going where you just were, or if you are headed to where they are.
One room had a small stage and a performer on it – a contortionist, but the looks of the shape they could bend themselves in to. Should you stop and watch? Or will lingering get you some undesired attention from something else nearby?
The rooms all have a general circus/carnival type theme. Our favorite was probably the funhouse area. If you go looking for a creature in a cage, you probably will find it. If you wonder where that smell of cotton candy is coming from, you definitely will find it. If you are observant and notice details, you might even find out what happened to circus legend P.T. Barnum.
And yes, there are clowns. There are also a few automated props — the first one actually caught me off guard and made me jump. Our favorite character was probably the mime that you run in to several times as your path winds in and out of its room. It is a very clever and efficient way to have an actor be able to cover multiple scare zones. The mime was funny, as he pulled us towards him with his invisible rope.
The entire walk takes about 20 minutes, but I could see it taking longer if you were hesitant to approach something at the end of a hallway. And, although “haunted house” appears in the description, I think the key word is “experience.” You are walking through a twisted circus-themed funhouse of lights, sounds, and creatures. This is not your typical “walk in to a room and someone jumps out and screams at you” haunt, though there were plenty of those moments.
I find it hard to describe, and even remember all the scenes (it just kept going, and going, and going), but I know I enjoyed it. It was not what I expected, and I want to see it again. I think a second time through would be even more fun. The first time, we were constantly on the lookout for folks to jump out and scream at us and likely missed plenty of details.
This haunt has a number of jump scares, but if you can handle those, I think it is more accessible to a wider age range than some extreme haunts are. We saw families with young kids coming out without any signs of trauma. While there were some minorly graphic scenes (butcher shop, some random body parts), it was not at all a gory splatter fest. It’s a circus, after all. Just a weird, dark, and twisted one.
Barnum Circus of Freaks was actually the first area haunt to reach out to me this year and invite me out to see what they were up to. I was too busy and did not have time to event start working on this website until mid-October. I regret not making time to visit with them earlier. I feel like I was late to this party.
If you go see it, tell them DM Haunted Houses sent ya. Thanks.
Since over half of the overnight votes (not even 100 yet) are not sure they are done with haunts yet, any predications made now are most certainly going to be wrong. Very wrong.
So let’s do that…
It has been five years since the last DMHH Victim’s Choice voting. I still expect the overall outcome to be very similar to past years, with two haunts taking most of the categories.
I was quite surprised to see both of them getting absolutely trounced in the initial voting from last night. There are so many new competing options that did not exist in 2018 that the whole haunt dynamic for Des Moines is very different. The more fragmented the audience gets, the less predictable the voting becomes.
Think of it like voting for a favorite TV station back when you usually had only a few TV stations (yeah, I’m old), versus cable with a hundred channels, versus streaming with millions of shows available on demand.
I think we have entered the early cable days with the haunt scene here.
This is going to be fun to watch, though I feel bad for any haunts that may get absolutely crushed.
DISCLAIMER: The results, as always, only represent a tiny portion of the haunt-going audience. These are folks so die-hard that they follow a site like DMHauntedHouses (or a haunted house site/social media). This naturally gives a haunt with a larger following an advantage, but in the past, a haunt with one of the smallest social media followings has come out on top in many categories. Just remember this is all for fun, and for bragging rights.
