Halloween has become big business, especially at theme parks around the world. Not only do theme park Halloween events help to extend the operational calendar, especially for ones located in more northern climates, but they give guests a reason to revisit their favorite parks for a different experience. Despite being known as the "Sweetest Place on Earth," Hersheypark After Dark promises to deliver a more sinister side of the Pennsylvania park.
The event features five haunted houses, three scare zones, and plenty of other Halloween activities, including a chance to ride many of the park’s coasters with the lights out. Hersheypark invited my son and I to represent Theme Park Insider at their opening night media event (appropriately on Friday the 13th), but the opinions expressed and reviews below are my own.
As part of the media event, we started the evening at one of the park’s catering areas where we had an opportunity to sample some of the unique foods served during Hersheypark After Dark. The park is offering a tasting pass that allows you to try five specialty Halloween themed dishes around the park. One of the more interesting dishes we sampled was spiral pasta with meatballs, called "All Eyes on Meat." While this doesn’t sound very thematic, this dish uses black-colored pasta. The colored pasta didn’t taste any different than regular noodles (no squid ink here), but the sauce used was cloyingly sweet, reminiscent of what you might find in a can. The meatballs were fine, appeared to be standard frozen meatballs you’d find at your local grocery store, but the sauce was very off-putting. The one savory dish I can recommend is the cheese curds, which are dusted with an Italian seasoning and served with ranch sauce for dipping. Honestly, the curds were fine without the sauce, and the highly variable sizes of the pieces would suggest that perhaps these weren’t from the freezer section. The other savory dishes we sampled were the pulled pork slider and "KILLbasa Bowl." which were fine but didn’t seem to be especially themed or exotic.
The best thematic foods we sampled were the desserts. There was a Cherry Cheesecake Jar topped with a gummy eyeball that was pretty good, though the cherry topping here seemed like it might have been from a can.
However, the cheesecake and chocolate cookie crumble beneath were good and helped to offset the very tart cherry filling. The other dessert we sampled was Cinnamon Bread Intestines, which were exceptionally gross looking with a gooey red syrup topping making the underlying bread look just like someone was disemboweled on your plate.
While the look was near perfect, the taste wasn’t quite what I wanted from this dish. The syrup didn’t have much flavor aside from a sugar overload, and the bread didn’t really have a lot of cinnamon mixed in, making it taste more like a dense funnel cake than cinnamon bread. It’s certainly a dish to choose if you want to freak out your friends, but I’m not sure I would buy this just to eat.
After leaving the catering area, we started roaming the park to ride some of the park’s coasters until the sun went down. As part of the media event, we were also invited to Spirits Bar near the front of the park just after sundown to sample one of their specialty cocktails. The bar can be accessed from inside the park but requires guests to go back through the main entrance to re-enter the park. (It’s connected to The Chocolatier restaurant, which can be accessed without a park ticket.) Spirits Bar has a laid-back vibe on an open rooftop with classic Halloween movies projected on one of the walls of an adjacent building. I tried the Graveyard Sunrise, which was presented with a smoke bubble topping the martini glass.
The cocktail was well balanced with a decent kick from the ghost pepper tequila. If you’re coming to Hersheypark to do the Halloween activities, I probably wouldn’t recommend coming back to the front for a drink, but for guests who want to enjoy a nice evening in the park and take in the season without getting your pants scared off, Spirits Bar might be a good option.
As with most theme park Halloween events, Hersheypark After Dark really kicks into gear after the sun goes down, even though many of the attractions are available earlier in the evening. The first haunted attraction we visited is new for the 2024 season. Estate of Evil is themed around an aristocratic mansion where guests are invited to tour 13 rooms, including an exterior greenhouse (a good reason to wait until dark before getting in line), wine cellar, stable, and various other opulently adorned rooms. A common theme I found with all of the Hersheypark After Dark haunted houses is the extensive theming and multitude of props decorating virtually every space. Estate of Evil has some great scares - one of the best is an oft-used trick of dropping wall openings that reveal an actor behind. However, here the actor we saw was behind a portrait, and had makeup and costuming to almost precisely match the painting. Normally this type of scare reveals an actor in a mask or monster makeup, so it was refreshing to see a unique take on this oft-used scare. The one issue with this haunted house was the overall pacing and some spots where it felt like there should have been some actors, but there was no one there (this could be a function of being opening night). However, for the first night of a brand-new haunted house, I was impressed with the overall quality and concept.
The next house we walked through was The Decent: Catacombs of Decay. This haunted house is themed around a mysterious gift shop with hidden tunnels below. Again, the props and decorations within this maze were top notch with very few plain walls over the first few rooms where you’re walking through the gift shop. However, the most memorable part of this maze was an effect I have not seen before, or at least not as well-executed as it was here. As guests work their way into the tunnel portions of the haunted house, designers use colored directional lights and thin fog to create the look of the surface of water. It’s an exceptionally executed effect that’s magnified by clever scare actors who hide below the line of lights and pop their head up as if rising from beneath the water. Designers utilize this effect again in another maze, but I was really impressed with how well it worked. There are also a couple of "infinity floors" used, but it seemed as though the guests in front and behind us may not have even noticed these effects. I think they could have been improved with a scare actor nearby to draw attention to them. I thought the overall pacing of this maze and the finish were off, a common issue with newer events and less experienced designers and actors.
Twisted Carnevil utilizes an oft-used theme of a carnival/circus with its various sideshows. This is yet another maze that is has top-notch decorations and props that fill almost every room. On our first run through of this maze, I was actually a bit disappointed in the ending, because the walls in the final couple of rooms are barren, but on the second time through we more clearly heard the script from the actor prior to the final two rooms indicating that we were going "backstage" of their theater, which perfectly explains why there were empty walls and bare studs. However, much like The Decent, this maze has some issues with pacing and a lackluster ending in addition to some noticeably empty spots where actors should be staged. I think if the empty spots are filled and the crew could work out the ending, this maze could be one of the better carnival/circus-themed mazes.
Haunted Coal Mine: Curse of the Tommyknockers is the one haunted house that is in a different part of the park from the others (in the Pioneer Frontier themed area of the park, while all the other haunted houses are located in the Midway America area). This maze starts off with an elevator ride into the haunted mine. Guests are led into a room where the door closes behind you and some wind, sound, and lighting effects simulate the ride down a shaft to the heart of the mine. The room you’re standing in doesn’t move, but the effects here are really convincing. Guests then exit out the door they came in and make their way through the mine. This haunted house has another room with the lighting and thin fog effects to create the look of water, though this house did not have any actors hiding beneath the misty, lighted surface. This house at least had a semblance of an ending with a number of scare actors staged near the exit, but it seemed that their timing was off, and relied on the oft-used (and frankly lazy) cliché of an actor with a chain saw trying to chase guests in the final scene. There’s nothing wrong with using cliches (there are only so many different ways to scare people and stay on theme), but you at least need to get the timing right and not have the exit right next to the entrance where entering guests can hear and see what’s going to happen in the finale.
By far the best maze at Hersheypark Dark Nights is Auntie Mortem’s Abattoir. Here, guests make their way through a family-owned facility where swine are slaughtered and processed. You go through every part of the process, including an eerie hallway where hides are hung, forcing guests to push them aside to reach the next room. I’ve been in plenty of mazes where designers hang various objects from the ceiling, from fishing line to body bags to carcasses, but these hides were incredibly convincing, and because they were thin and light (unlike heavy bags or carcasses), brushing up against them with your hands and body was an exceptionally well-done effect. There is a spinning tunnel room here that separates the factory portion of the house and the office portion, and it is very disorienting. There is also a split in the house, though we ended up being directed down the same path both times we went through. The finish here is also a bit lacking with the final series of scares a bit predictable, but I would put this up against many of the best HHN houses I’ve done.
Given how excellently appointed the haunted houses are, you would think the scare zones would be equally detailed. However, like so many theme parks around the country, the scare zones are just a bunch of costumed actors dressed to a general theme and trying to sneak up behind guests trying to scare them.
Midway of Misery is a circus themed scare zone with clowns, stilt walkers, and security guards (I guess even circuses needs security these days) doubling as sliders.
Fallout Zone is the ubiquitous apocalyptic scare zone you see at every Halloween event.
However, I thought it was clever to equip the actors dressed as scientists with old-fashioned clipboards, which worked great as props to make clicking sounds and scraping sounds when dragged across the pavement. Darkstone’s Hollow is located in the pathway between Comet Hollow and Pioneer Frontier, but we only caught a glimpse of early in the evening while it was still light outside.
I found Hersheypark After Dark to be really impressive. This part of Pennsylvania and northern Maryland is already littered with one-off haunted attractions that have established cult-like followings. However, the park really delivers an excellent experience with top-notch haunted houses that I thought were as good or better than those offered at other theme parks in the mid-Atlantic region. Add in the extensive collection of coasters that are only accentuated when riding at night (particularly with uplighting turned off), and Hersheypark puts on a great event. As with any seasonal event early in the season, it will take some time for the park to work out the kinks and continue to improve the experience. However, I envision Hersheypark eventually becoming a staple of the Halloween theme park landscape and a destination worth driving many miles to experience.
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