You’re not alone in the woods at Zip KC’s Exiled: Trail of Terrors

Photo by Elijah LaFolette

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

Even the drive out to the Exiled Trail of Terrors is spooky.

Leaving Bonner Springs behind, you take wooded backroads to the west, driving alongside railroad tracks and the river. On the night that I went, the ambiance was completed by a big, bright autumn moon.

You keep driving until you reach a dead-end road and a parking lot opposite some underground cold storage. The lot is illuminated by a giant, glaring light that may brighten up the parked cars but makes the surrounding shadows all the deeper and darker.

From there, you have to walk the equivalent of a block or two down that aforementioned dead-end road before you reach the red-lit sign for the haunt itself. Hopefully, the trek from the parking lot to the haunted trail hasn’t tired you out. You are in for a hike.

Photo by Elijah LaFolette

Originally established in 2015, Exiled: Trail of Terrors is a production of Zip KC and takes advantage of the same outdoor area they use for their “Zipline Adventures and Activities,” as well as the KC Timber Challenge, an outdoor obstacle course that runs between 1.5 and 3.1 miles. As such, the ground that you’ll cover in the Trail of Terrors is not for the faint of heart for more reasons than one.

It is common for haunts to ballyhoo their intensity, and Exiled: Trail of Terrors is no exception. But in this case, the intensity is not just in the form of scares. A warning on the website declares that Exiled is not for those who are afraid of “getting down and dirty, sweating, or stepping into the haunting darkness of the great outdoors,” and they aren’t kidding.

Photo by Elijah LaFolette

For starters, your group—no matter how large or small—is equipped with only a single red LED flashlight (the tiny keychain kind) for illumination. And, in my case, the light spookily gave out partway through the hike. Fortunately, the haunt provides enough light for you to see where you’re going, at least most of the time, with the LEDs mainly helpful in making out details or reading eerie signs and scrawled graffiti along the trail.

More to the point, however, when they refer to the Trail of Terrors as a hike, they aren’t exaggerating. Another warning on the website cautions: “The hike will require physical stamina to climb hills, bend, and stoop. You MUST wear closed-toe shoes to enter this attraction. The woods contain hidden rocks, obstacles, bugs, animals, and other hazards.”

While I didn’t encounter many bugs or other wildlife on the trail itself, I can vouch for the hills and the rest of it. There are plenty of up-and-down hills and stairs, a portion of the trail where you have to stoop down (or even crawl) to get through an opening, and lots more. The most rigorous section of the excursion has the option to skip it by taking a (well-marked) alternative fork, but unfortunately, if you do so, you miss one of the more inventive and atmospheric moments of the trail, which involves climbing up through the interiors of two wrecked school buses.

Photo by Elijah LaFolette

Aside from intense and physically demanding, “inventive” might be the most apt term for the Exiled experience overall. There are plenty of haunt staples, of course, from scare actors who follow you silently to the obligatory guy with a chainsaw.

“We removed the chain this year,” one of the haunt organizers jokingly told me. “So that nothing like last year will happen again.”

But mixed in among them are plenty of touches that showcase the enthusiasm and creativity of the haunt’s operators.

Besides those wrecked buses I mentioned, there are many other highlights. In one area, you enter a haunted “swamp” simulated by ground fog and laser lights to create the sense that you’re wading chest-deep in murky water. In another, an outdoor “room” has been cordoned off and populated by a dozen or so classic “sheet ghosts.”

It’s a nice visual to start with and is only amplified in its effectiveness because you can’t easily skirt the specters, requiring you to walk right through the midst of them without knowing which ones—if any—will jump out and get you. They even bring in the zipline elements, the location’s bread and butter the rest of the year, for another inventive scare.

While many of the individual set pieces may not be able to compete with those of more established indoor haunts such as The Beast or Edge of Hell, the cumulative effect is, if anything, a more novel one than we have been conditioned to expect from our Halloween entertainments, and the haunt as a whole can easily stand up alongside the best that any of the rest of the region has to offer.

The Trail of Terrors also has something of an ace up its sleeve in the form of its outdoor setting. While most indoor haunts trade on a sense of claustrophobia, outdoor haunts have their own unique charms and their own ways of making our skin crawl. Exiled makes good use of its location, with a twisting, turning trail that often allows you to catch glimpses of other areas before you reach them, hear shouts and cries and screams from deeper in the woods, or even just occasionally spot a shadowy figure moving out there in the dark, reminding you that you aren’t alone.

Exiled is open Friday and Saturday nights through October 28. Tickets are available starting at $49, and going through the haunt takes a little more than half an hour. It’s a good idea to book in advance, but they aren’t kidding about the stamina part. If you can’t climb, crouch, crawl, and make your way over uneven terrain easily, you may have to give this one a pass.