Haunted House Diary: Kicking off the Spooky Season with Halloween Haunt at Worlds of Fun

Photo by Orrin Grey

This is part of our 2023 Haunted House coverage. Read more here.

I underestimated Worlds of Fun.

Despite living in the Kansas City area for more than two decades, I’ve never gone to their Halloween Haunt event, which has been growing steadily since 2003. My reasons for giving it a pass over the years have been manifold. Too crowded, I told myself. But more to the point, I assumed that the Halloween Haunt at Worlds of Fun was going to be something a little like a spooky Renaissance Festival – some cornstalk decorations, some dry ice fog, and some scare actors lurking around the park, but not a real, proper haunt.

I was extremely wrong.

This year, I finally went because I was covering it for this very publication, and to say that I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement. For starters, this year introduced a new addition to the Haunt lineup, the “Zombie Boo-ffet” – a massive, all-you-can-eat banquet prepared by a very enthusiastic resident chef, complete with themed entrees to match some of the park’s various attractions.

When you imagine theme park food, I guarantee that you don’t imagine anything like this. There were ribs and chicken, mashed potatoes and salad, mac and cheese and Halloween-themed desserts, plus adult beverages served in “blood bags,” which the chef described as like a “grown-up Capri Sun.” Honestly, my greatest regret of the entire evening is that I didn’t arrive hungrier.

As a newcomer to the whole Worlds of Fun Haunt experience, I kicked off the evening in traditional fashion by watching the Overlord’s Awakening, a parade that signals the park’s transformation from daytime theme park to Halloween wonderland.

From there, a tour of the various haunts began!

And when I say various, I mean just that. The big surprise of the evening was the sheer number and variety of haunts present. This year, Worlds of Fun boasts no less than seven full haunts, two of them out-of-doors, and as with the Boo-ffet, each one massively exceeded my expectations. 

While not as large as the biggest haunts around, each separate haunt attraction took about 20 minutes to explore, give or take, and the seven haunts covered a variety of themes including a zombie high school, a vampire-infested manor and crypt, a slaughterhouse, a bayou setting, the streets of Whitechapel and the crimes of Jack the Ripper, a creepy corn maze, and a village that has been overrun by a pumpkin curse.

Nor were these modest undertakings. As a longtime aficionado of the holiday, I have attended some of the biggest and most impressive haunts on offer, and these were at most a notch or two below the best of them.

Besides the usual scare actors in costume and makeup, there were large-scale set pieces, massive animatronics, and some cleverly-devised gimmicks. In the haunted bayou, for example, there was a massive alligator head the size of a small car, and a chapel-like room built around an enormous heart that could have been imported straight from a game of Castlevania.

Not all the best elements were as ambitious as that, either. In the pumpkin haunt, for example, near the end you actually enter an area made to look like a giant pumpkin. Once you are inside, the walls are fibrous, and gross pumpkin “guts” and giant pumpkin seeds dangle everywhere. It’s a simple idea, but it’s so effective!

Over the years, I had told myself a lot of myths about what the Worlds of Fun Haunt was “probably like.” One of those was that it would be more all-ages appropriate; its scares bowdlerized for kids. I was wrong about that, too. The haunts here are every bit as gory as anything you’ll find elsewhere.

The BloodShed haunt, in particular, is like a jam-up of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the Pet-Pak Cannery from Razorback. Maybe don’t go there right after you’ve been to the Zombie Boo-ffet.

As if seven full haunts weren’t enough, there’s also more going on around the park. There are several live shows, as well as a couple more “walk-through” haunts that are more like what I was expecting the overall experience to be – performers doing bits and interacting with pedestrians as they pass through certain areas of the park. You can hang out and watch the performers, or just get some nice ambiance as you go by on your way to the next ride or haunt, carnival game or spooky concession.

And ambiance is something that can’t be overstated when it comes to the Worlds of Fun Halloween Haunt. They’ve done a nice job transforming the park for the season, with spooky music piped in over the PA system and park benches that have been transmogrified into pumpkins, to name just a few.

Even the untransformed parts of the park are a boon to the experience, though. Anyone who has ever gone to a big Halloween haunt knows that a not-insubstantial portion of your time is going to be spent standing in line.

And while standing in line is rarely much fun, standing in line with a rollercoaster whizzing by just over your shoulder is a whole lot cooler.

The Halloween Haunt at Worlds of Fun runs select nights through October 28. Tickets start at $39.99, and the Zombie Boo-ffet tickets are only a few dollars more. However, with seven haunts, that’s a lot of waiting in line, so you may want to upgrade to a Fast Lane ticket, which starts at $75 and lets you jump the line on all the main haunts, as well as lots of rides.