Haunted House

I’m the last person who should be reviewing a haunted anything as I can’t handle even the most innocuous ghost stories enjoyed by tots (e.g. was totally freaked out by Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-​Rabbit). So, the physicality of enclosures designed to terrify adults is just not something that interests me.
However, I couldn’t be more enthused about this bit of local flavor: Every October, a family in the sleepy town of Roselle sets up three big tents in their front yard and crafts within them a truly excellent Halloween experience for the community. We’d been noticing the tents for a while, but only started investigating them last year. I figured it was going to be the usual cutesy Halloween stuff, but no. The level of creepiness and goriness was such that I couldn’t handle actually entering the tents, so I mostly looked on as my partner Wolf R. had a good time checking everything out. But even he got a little surprise at the end: While looking into the coffin in the last tent, he was spooked by a large vampire swinging down from above, and a second later, he was further startled by a person dressed in all black, including a black face mask, creeping up behind him. I’d have laughed if I wasn’t so busy making sure nothing was creeping up behind me.
This year I felt a bit more bold and decided to follow a whole group of little kids into the leftmost tent, themed like a haunted carnival with evil clowns. This ain’t so bad, I thought, enjoying the creative clowns and even snapping a pic. And then, I don’t even understand what it was, but the odd noises and spinning lights they’d set up conspired to get under my skin and I felt like I was going to totally lose it if I didn’t retreat *immediately*. My god.
The middle tent was the gory cannibalistic one, with zombies and body parts and — well, I won’t spoil it for you. It was so gross that I couldn’t actually look at it long enough to take a picture. And this year, the last tent was themed like a haunted hotel with black lights. Nothing jumped out at my partner this time but he still loved it.
As it turns out, the haunted house also promotes a good cause: They collect non-​perishable food for the Bloomingdale Food Pantry. The family also accepts donations if you’d like to chip in to their haunted house efforts.
I’m just hoping they’ll do a set of friendly winter wondertents one of these Decembers :)
Hours: According to the listing on this page (
), they’re open 6−10PM Thursdays through Sundays in October, with extended hours in the last week of October.