Happy Halloween!

At the end of summer, Mojojacob, a few others and I were talking about a night of Halloween Scary Fun (#HalloweenScaryFun) but we waited until the week before Halloween to make any plans.

It has been years since I visited a haunted house and some others mentioned not too scary of stuff, so we thought a haunted hayride might be our best bet. We didn’t know anything the ones in Petersburg, Kentucky or Lebanon, Ohio (Springboro Haunted Hayride).

I had asked Rachel of SmallTownBigCincy if she knew anything about either because when it comes to amusement parks and attractions, she’s my resource. She said with full disclosure that she does makeup Springboro one, but still recommended the hayride and black bog. Still undecided, we tweeted our invite and got a reply from @SpringboroHaunt that we should visit theirs.

The good thing about tweeting with them is that we learned the hayrides started at approximately 7:45pm, which wasn’t listed on the website. It says the ticket booth opens at sundown (thank you Weather Channel for telling us it was 6:33pm that evening) and closes at 11 or 11:30pm (conflicting times on website) and warns of long lines on busy nights (we were there the last night of the season).

We loved that their twitter account interacted with us so we thought why not! In what can only be describe as coincidence or was it?! We parked the car in a big open field, started to walk toward the attraction and received this tweet:

ahhhhhh!

After getting our tickets, we met the figure behind the Twitter account (but I’ll never revealed who!) and then stood in line to board. Since they’ve been doing this 23 years (why did I never hear about this while at UD?!) they have a pretty good set-up with guests waiting in a snake line before climbing a few stairs to a platform the onto the wagon. The wagon’s perimeter is lined with hay bales and that’s your seat – it’s a hayride – I heard some girls say, wow we have to sit on hay.

I don’t want to ruin too much of what happens during the approximately 20-minute ride, but you’re traveling through a corn field and wooded areas encountering various scenes, sights and sounds. One of the funny moments for Maureen and I was a clown who quoted a Rihanna song or I misunderstood what he said about whips or chains.

Funniness aside, Maureen, myself and the ladies across from us were all scared off our hay bales into the middle of the wagon. I couldn’t tell you what it was that did it. I was glad we weren’t seated in the back because they acquired a friend for a part of the ride! Eventually, we trained to maintain an air of nonchalance so that we did not seem as big of target and it seemed to work okay.

We saw plenty of families, but I cannot imagine taking my 6- or 8-year-old nieces on this (little girls and their shrill screams are not music to my ears), but my 9-year-old nephew would be fun to take!

After de-boarding the wagon we stopped by the concession stand, which is housed in a beautiful barn decorated with old license plates and feed bags (but I like old things so I was delighted). There are plenty of picnic tables to enjoy hot or cold cider, hot chocolate, soda, soft pretzels, hot dogs, caramel apples, popcorn, candy and chips. We watched the people coming back from the black bog and I didn’t hear too much chatter about what they saw, but their shoes didn’t seem as dirty as I thought (they warn you to wear old shoes and we didn’t got because we weren’t sure what to expect our feet to encounter). There’s always next year!

Springboro Haunted Hayride & Black Bog
See a video preview of the 2011 attraction.
Open Fridays and Saturdays beginning late September.
2011 prices:
Parking $2
Hayride $12
Bog $10
Combo $18

Hopefully next year we can organize a group to and enjoy HalloweenScaryFun with more friends!

Disclosure: I was not compensated for this post. I wrote this review because I enjoyed the attraction and hope others will visit in the future.