Reaper's Revenge 460 Green Grove Road Scranton, PA    https://reapersrevenge.net

Haunted Hayride

This my second year in a row here and the first time was a blast. The beginning of the hayride starts with a castle facade and giant skeleton animatronic looking up at the sky with a human skull in his hand and a deep voice talking about your doom. Then a giant flash of fire bursts into the sky. You proceed to a Halloween Michael Myers scene were a TV plays part of Halloween and Michael Myers comes after the wagon. You then come to a Ring scene where the creepy girl comes at the wagon from a stone circle pit and contorts her body in the middle of the wagon. Next is a zombie scene where zombies are attacking the wagon and then a mirror ball turns on and they start doing Michael Jackson's Thriller dance. You then proceed to a pagan sacrifice scene where two animal skull head members abduct a person from your wagon. You then go through these giant jack-o-lanterns in the trees with giant arms for branches. Then you go into a new scene with Alice in Wonderland style glow in the dark sets that look really cool. We then see Jason Voorhees, of course, and Freddy Kruger in the next scene and that is when security takes you off the wagon and you walk into a security booth where they mess with you and send you walking into the next attraction.

Lost Carnival

You wander down a path into the woods and go through a couple gypsy shacks with menacing characters before you reach a midway scene with ghoulish barkers and game operators. The fake games are great, and the carnival is literally an old carnival with a working Ferris wheel where they ask you if you want to ride forever.  Then you enter a fun house with all the bright crazy colors of a fun house and its day glow madness. Next, you wander through various rooms and long hallways with distorting sizes and paths that are made to confuse and mess with your perception. There is this one clown girl that pops out from every direction and scares you through many different doors. Then you wander down one hallway to come across a bearded belly dancer who definitely made us laugh because it was the last thing were were expecting. Then you turn the corner into a stuffed animal hallway complete with a person in a stuffed animal gillie suit who jumps out to scare you. I actually knew it was coming and it still surprised me. The last section is a checkered dub step hallway complete with a crazed checkered clown. This was a great take on a fun house and even though there are dirt floors in places you feel like you are in a weird 80's carnival horror movie. This is well done and blows away the carnival style ride in Universal, the Carnival Graveyard, with better props and more money.

Pitch Black

Okay, so I have known about these style rides for awhile because they have been around in Canada for years.  In fact, one of my favorite rides is called Nightmares and is located in the Canadian Niagara Falls area. There used to be other ones similar to that ride in Canada like the Screamers Franchise but they seemed to have closed down. These style rides take you into darkness and you must find your way out. In Canada they use red lights that you follow but in the states they generally let you fumble in the dark or give you a piece of cloth or rope to hold on to. Also, don't confuse these rides with the ride Black Out which is a NYC haunt that is more weird and disturbing then a traditional haunt. With that all said, I really like Reaper's Revenge's take on this ride and thought it was manic and great. You enter the ride only to be escorted by a gross and disgusting janitor worker into a big old elevator and travel down to the lower floors with, of course, some disrupting jerks and shakes. As you exit the elevator you are dropped into a crazy black tunnel of manic insanity. There is a disturbing bass sound that echos in your head as you try to find your way through this crazy dark maze. There are occasional flashes of light as you're startled by numerous creatures and animals in this dark hell. This is quite an experience and I don't think words can do it justice. We all enjoyed it and in my opinion this haunt does it better then any of the other versions of this style I have seen in the United States, up to and including Universal's Seeds of Extinction.

Sector 13

Once again, Reaper's revenge does another amazing job depicting an end of the world quarantine version of a prison. It may sound as if I am endorsing Reaper's Revenge or I am friends with the haunt, but in fact I work at another prison style haunt and have no connection to Reaper's Revenge.  They just do a bang up job. They begin this attraction by yelling orders to you to place your hands on your chest and they usher you into a room where you watch news media on tv showing war footage and newscasters talking about doom. You then are forced into metal chutes with catwalks above and are ordered to put your hands on your head. This experience is reminiscent of military style holding cells, and is very psychologically distressing from the layman's perspective. It definitely makes you feel a sense of being herded like cattle. You then go through a maze of bunks and experiments and mad doctors and nurses and other creatures all very manic and aggressive. Once again, Reaper's Revenge did a better job on this then Universal did with their Seeds of Extinction or Shocktoberfest's Prison.