🚨👻 Our Visit To Elysburg Haunted House 👻🚨
Date: 10/28/2023
Location: Elysburg, PA
Elysburg Haunted House is easily one of the longest running haunted attractions on the east coast & by far takes the cake as the longest running Pennsylvania haunt! It’s 2023 and Elysburg Haunted House is back for their 47th year of providing a frightfully fun experience! Our crew got our first taste of the spooky fun that the Elysburg Haunted House offers back in 2020. They’ve been a must visit on our Haunt Tours ever since! What makes Elysburg Haunted House such a gem of a haunt is their passionate cast & crew, who are consistently deserving recipients of our top 5 “Best Cast & Crew Award” the past few seasons!
We arrived on the property shortly after 7pm on a fairly warm Saturday evening. Certainly feels odd to be wearing short sleeves in late October, but nonetheless we were pumped for an evening of spooky fun! As you make your way towards the midway area you are immediately immersed into the upbeat and spooky fun atmosphere. The midway area featured at least half a dozen food trucks to satisfy any and all of your hankerings & cravings, ample seating areas, upbeat music, and numerous roaming spooks! Don’t forget to swing by the merchandise stand to snag some Elysburg Haunt memorabilia.
For those who are unaware, Elysburg Haunted House is a fundraiser for the local fire department(s) in the Elysburg area. Despite not having a large budget for construction and marketing purposes, these folks have crafted a truly legendary and must-see haunted attraction experience! For just $20 you’ll receive a solid 30 minutes of legitimate in attraction experience, by far one of the best bang for your buck haunt experiences you’ll ever encounter! All proceeds go to a good cause, which has even helped the Elysburg Fire Department purchase a 1-million dollar fire engine in years past!
Once ready to experience Elysburg Haunted House you’ll hop into the queue line. Be forewarned that this place draws in massive crowds & can develop a rather lengthy wait in a hurry (2+ hours at times)! No fast pass option available here, so if you’re looking to minimize your wait visit these folks early on in the season OR arrive early on the night you plan to attend. Eventually the queue line will lead directly past the ticket booth where you’ll snag your tickets and head forth to the opening scene. Brand new for 2023 is a beautifully crafted mansion facade that is the lone barrier between you & the mayhem in the woods! A lovely witch character read us the rules of the attraction and then sent us forth on our journey! These folks are truly masterful at their line management, as even on their busiest of nights you’ll never encounter a conga-line through Elysburg Haunted House.
Elysburg Haunted House consists of one large massive indoor walkthrough smack dab in the middle of two lengthy outdoor trails. Be prepared to encounter literally everything and anything along your journey, ranging from a Satanic Church to a Skunk House (good luck making it out without being sprayed - EWWW!) to a Witches Hut (super cool ambiance & incredible “hosts”)! From start to end we were thoroughly impressed with the originality of the scenes at Elysburg Haunted House! All of the sets and its contents were clearly handmade and delicately crafted. While you won’t encounter massive high-end animatronics or loads of special effects, Elysburg Haunted House has plenty of special tricks up their sleeves that are sure to startle even the most experienced haunt goer! Stationary props came to life, walls converged to trap guests, trick doors, and many other unique tactics were utilized to disorient guests. The “War Zone” scene featured an army fellow hollering “fire in the hole”, a crashed plane, & realistic audio effects to immerse you into a high-intensity battleground. Move swiftly as you try to dodge the bullets! We ventured below deck on the pirate ship & encountered a slew of irate pirates, accusing us of stealing their treasure & providing quite a few startle scares. Not to mention there must’ve been rotting corpses on this ship, as the odor was horrendous! A forest of Christmas trees possessed a few ghillie characters that were cleverly hidden & would provide quick startle scares. Objects that didn’t appear like they should or could move fooled us several times, catching us off-guard providing more spine-tingling startles. Heck, even a remote control car was disguised as a massive spider that came chasing after us, such a frightfully-clever idea!
The multi-story house walk-through looks deceiving from the outside, but be forewarned, it’s not for the faint of heart! Harvey, one of the masterminds behind Elysburg Haunted House’s success, greeted us out-front of the house & engaged with us for a bit. The infamous & exhilarating elevator was sadly out of order, but have no fear, they have great plans for this area for 2024. You’ll then slowly traverse through the 2-story house, receiving countless spine-tingling scares along the way! The spooks throughout the house are sneaky & appear literally out of nowhere to deliver startles. At one point we were “dancing with Satan” as we ventured into a demented church funeral that ended with the lights cutting out & our crew being on the receiving end of a bone-chilling surprise. One of the most unique scenes was easily the rainforest/swamp-esque section featuring large snakes & a man-sized rat, YIKES! Special shout-out to our favorite clown whom possesses the Pinocchio-esque nose!
Elysburg Haunted Houses boasts over 10+ new & redesigned scenes for the 2023 haunt season! Just when we thought these folks couldn’t find new ways to surprise us… boy were we wrong! We don’t want to give away too many of the incredible new scenes, but we can’t not mention arguably our favorite scene encountered anywhere all season! Just steps inside the decrepit house we rounded a corner & entered a narrow corridor with a cornfield-esque vibe. Before we knew it the lights cut out & suddenly massive crows began descending rapidly from the ceiling, dive-bombing at us with a vengeance! Loud crow squeals echoed through the scene while the lights strobed & flickered to further disorient us! One of our members, Justin, has his hat knocked right off his head by these unrelenting crows! Truly a one-of-kind scene that was masterfully executed & delivered a crow-tastic & frightening surprise!
With being a true old school style haunted attraction, Elysburg Haunted House uses little animatronics or high end special effects, relying heavily on their cast and crew to deliver the scares & bring their show to life! Elysburg Haunted House was crawling with spooks and had legitimately no major areas of dead space! The cast and crew here at Elysburg Haunted House is always an energized and passionate crew! These folks have a true passion for haunting & to top it off they are all completely volunteers - WOW! These folks were energized, interactive, and provided phenomenal performances, succeeding countless times at providing sneaky hair-raising startles!
We just love how creative & thrifty the Elysburg team is when it comes to their scenic design & methods to deliver startles! Many of the spooks have multiple resources available to them to deliver frights, allowing groups to go through multiple times in a night yet receive a different startle each time! Elysburg Haunted House defies all odds & shows you don’t need high-end animatronics to effectively scare folks… for example, those horrifying & vengeful crows were referred to were made from everyday items, socks & styrofoam balls; HOW GENIUS!!
After exiting Elysburg Haunted House we had the pleasure of chatting with the owners and managers that make Elysburg Haunted House the top-notch attraction that it is. These folks were oozing with passion for Halloween and clearly love what they do! Heck, they are already brainstorming ideas for 2024 & several years past that, these folks clearly never sleep. We even had the incredible opportunity to go behind the scenes in some of the areas and got to learn more about the history and evolution of Elysburg Haunted House! These folks are stoked to now have security cameras covering the vast majority of their massive attraction. This footage allows their security team the ability to keep both the customers & actors safe, while also helping to improve the flow through of the attraction! We had an absolute blast watching fellow customers get startled!
Elysburg Haunted House is still by far the best kept secret in the haunt industry! The experience Elysburg Haunted House provides is unique, immersive, and just downright frightfully fun! Elysburg Haunted House is a MUST-SEE Haunted Attraction as it’s sure to please all varieties of haunt goers! If you’re a haunted attraction guru and you’ve yet to visit Elysburg Haunted House, pencil them into your schedule, you won’t be disappointed! Job well done to the entire Elysburg Haunted House team! Thank you for all that you folks do for the community and keep providing that old school spooky fun experience we’ve come to know & LOVE! We were once again truly blown away by the experience Elysburg Haunted House offers and will most certainly be visiting again for many years to come!