The Busch Gardens Tampa blog just posted this Zombie Brain Cupcake recipe made from Red Velvet, chocolate, and raspberry in honor of their 2011 Howl O Scream event. (I will be attending this year for the 3rd year in a row!)

I can’t wait to go to this – I heard that the Zombie Mortuary house they have is INSANE.

The long and the short of this review is that The Scarehouse in Pittsburgh is awesome and you should go to it this season.

Check out their new attraction, Pittsburgh Zombies:

The Scarehouse Bunny:

The Scarehouse is up this hill to the right:

The neighborhood:

OK, let’s talk about this topic, gaiz.

Last year, I didn’t go to Pittsburgh’s Scarehouse haunted attraction because I had seen poor reviews on Yelp. It’s a damn shame that I didn’t realize that Yelp has been reported to delete and manipulate the reviews on their site if a company doesn’t pay them. Read the comments of the article I just linked. You will see some business owners who have had mostly positive reviews who are confused as to why they were all deleted and replaced with the one negative review they received. Here is a screenshot:

The Scarehouse in Pittsburgh, PA also appears to have been maligned by the issues at Yelp.com.

I went to The Scarehouse last night. I have never met Scott (the Creative Director) or anyone else who works with this haunt. I paid full price to enter just like everyone else. I also paid to drive 6 hours from New Jersey to my old hometown of Pittsburgh.

The reviews that claim this attraction is 4 minutes long or 10 minutes long are absolute total bullshit. My group was inside the house for at LEAST 20 minutes, probably a lot longer. It was a really long attraction!

I am not sure why competing haunts don’t understand that by planting fake information on other attractions (I have to assume this is the cause), they are encouraging the general public to write off the entire industry. A casual consumer probably doesn’t care that much for haunts. I know a lot of people who experienced a bad one when they were younger and have unfairly judged all haunts based on this. If you train your consumer base to think all haunts are bad or plant fake reviews that claim your bad haunt is good, it’s just bad for everyone.

But I digress. What was inside The Scarehouse?

The Scarehouse is made of 3 attractions this year: The Forsaken, Delerium, and Pittsburgh Zombies. The queue is nicely themed with old movie posters and disturbing film clips. Some scare actors (including the evil Bunny) were outside messing with people. They weren’t conga lining people through the attractions – they were pulsing groups through slowly. This is the best way to put people through a haunt so that they don’t miss anything.

The Forsaken: This haunt is an amalgamation of horrors. I encountered monsters of every type, great set pieces, claustrophobia chambers, you name it. The execution (no pun intended) was great!

Delerium 3D: Delerium is a 3D attraction that really delivers the most unique scenes I have ever encountered in a haunt. I’ve been to many 3D attractions and a lot of them seem to be a “haunt by numbers” deal. That was not the case with this one. It seemed that the designs and set pieces were made from the ground up. I haven’t seen any demonic cupcakes and a TRULY shaky floor at any other haunt.

Pittsburgh Zombies: This one was very well done and just as full of local history as it was scary. Having grown up in Pittsburgh, I was amused by the nods toward the Steel City’s more prosperous past. There is a really great fake ending that surprised all of us, too.

I can’t remember which section this was in, but at one point there was what appeared to be a 20 ft tall robot attacking us. There was also a giant monster that was pretty impressive.

I do have some constructive criticism!

- I hope they develop a more definitive storyline around The Forsaken in the years to come. I know it was awesome because I went through it, but I’m not really sure why they were forsaken or who the Bunny is.

- The small part of the attraction where everything is absolutely dark didn’t work. It caused a blockage because people would just stop dead. This negated the pulsing they were doing to load people into the attraction. I hope that they add some low lights on the floor like Eastern State Penitentiary does in theirs. That way, it still looks scary as if it were dark, but you aren’t disoriented enough to stop dead.

- I liked the haunt enough to buy a T Shirt or Hoodie, but the designs they had (a picture of the evil rabbit) didn’t appeal to me. I tend to like more subversive/stylish T Shirt designs like this. That is just me, though.

Should you go to the Scarehouse? Most definitely! These guys have extremely high-quality set pieces and many scare actors working inside them. I would put them on par with the amazing set pieces that Busch Gardens Tampa creates. (English translation: VERY good.)

I most definitely intend to make the 6 hour drive next year. I am never listening to Yelp again.

The Scarehouse is freaking awesome.

EDIT:

Even since I made my first post about the trouble Scarehouse was having with Yelp.com, I have received a lot of emails, tweets, and other forms of communication. My post was picked up on a few haunt sites and other bloggers have also started tracking this.

The
Scarehouse Yelp #Fail has been documented. A call to action was put forth, to no avail. @scarehousescott tweeted that he kept getting positive reviews, but Yelp kept filtering them and preventing them from showing. The negative reviews still remain on his profile.

Yelp responded that they were contacting him, but he just received another copy and paste email. Scott still has no solution to his issue. Yelp continues to display bad reviews – some that (I know for a fact) state factually incorrect things and were probably placed there maliciously.

It seems that Yelp does not care that what they are displaying on their website can hurt small businesses like Scott’s. Scott does an excellent job with his haunt. I hope that people see my post about his haunt first and aren’t put off by the misleading Yelp page.

When I started reviewing haunted attractions in 2008, I did so because I was mad. I had gone to a few haunted attractions based on reviews I read online. A three hour drive and $80+ later taught me a hard lesson – many reviews that you find posted online are altered for nefarious purposes. I looked into it a bit more and it became clear to me that there are fake reviews posted on haunted attractions. Some are positive by the people who work there. Others are negative by people who work at competing haunts.

This is all BULLSHIT.

The way I see, it, fake review warfare is a great way to teach the general public that haunted attractions aren’t something the mainstream should bother with. Imagine if someone goes to a haunt or two based on positive reviews to find something stupid. They’ll think all haunts are stupid. This CANNOT stand. I decided then and there that it was my job to go to as many haunted attractions as I could each year and write about them. There are 2 reasons I am doing this:

1. I like haunted attractions.
2. I like haunted attractions.

One thing I have always stood for is honesty. I do not lie to my readers. Some of the attractions do invite me to review their attractions as a guest. When this happens, I’ll let you know that. I always love and appreciate the opportunity to work with and speak with haunt owners to get the creative story of their haunts. It helps me better highlight their attraction. However, readers should note that I make enough money to pay my own way into attractions without a problem, so my career is not dependent on free rides. My reviews aren’t affected by them, either.

Before the haunt owners get nervous, I have to also say that you’ll always get honesty and fairness from me. What I mean by “fairness” is that I will not give a low budget haunt a bad review and compare it to Universal Studios. I’ll give you the review in context. There are some AMAZING small haunts out there which are just as fun as the big haunts. Other haunts are new and just developing – I will note this and track their growth over time. Reviewing things is more complicated than “good” or “bad”. You have to really understand the type of haunt you are going to and the vision of the owner.

If there are any haunts you think I should be visiting, please let me know. (Right now I can only travel to NJ, PA, MD, CT, NY. FL and the nearby area unless you are awesome enough to pay for my travel.) If you want me to visit your attraction or interview you about your work, email me from the link above in the top bar.

I’ll have a landing page for all the haunts I have done with an alphabetical listing organized by state up in a few days.

If you want to see my experiences live as they unfold, follow me on Twitter, and note my newly-coined hashtag #OniHaunts.

This, my friends is my reward for working all of those long hours all year long with almost no break:

One of the most popular features on my blog is my yearly Haunt Tour. It officially begins tomorrow. I’ll be visiting and and reviewing as many haunted attractions as I can this Halloween season. Busch Gardens Tampa and Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights are the crowning glory of my tour.

YOU GUYS THIS IS MY FAVORITE TIME OF YEAR.

Some crazy and amazing things happened this past weekend. Intervention 2011 happened. This was our second year of operation. When I said in 2010 that we were here to Intervene and Inspire people to embrace the intersection of fandom and technology, I was not kidding. Only the people closest to me know how hard I’ve worked and how much I sacrificed to make this happen. The sleepless nights and the daily fits of pushing myself past my comfort zone paid off.

The result has proven itself to be a hybrid conference/convention that has revolutionized the con-going experience.

How did last weekend go? Amazing. To be straight up about it- the whole weekend was a blur for me. I was in Ops overseeing the show. That’s the kick in the ass – I don’t get to actually go to my own convention really.

The event ran like a well-oiled machine that I haven’t seen in some events that have run 10+ years. We’ve leveraged social media and just plain excellent customer service unlike any other event I have ever seen. For example, I saw on Twitter that an exhibitor had a headache. 30 seconds later my Operations Manager was at their table with some Asprin. We’ve been blogging aspects of the event and featuring artists and guests on the blog during the event and even tested out some games on our Twitter. We had bloggers like Mommy Wants Vodka, people like Carrie Gouldin of ThinkGeek.com, NASA employees, podcasters, authors, burlesque performers, Net Neutrality experts, webcomics, and about 40 some other creative bohemians of the intelligent type speaking about doing what they love and using the internet to make it happen. After night fell, epic room parties broke out – the atrium filled with people LARPing, singing, podcasting, and the convention turned into a giant party. (See above.) Our attendance was greatly increased this year. I think the word is getting out that we are the event to go to.

That’s the kind of show *I* run.

Enablers are people who donated money to help us support the programming. Much to my surprise, the Enabler/Guest Meet and Greet was too big for it’s assigned room. For 2012, we are adding more benefits for Enablers, and doubling the size of the room for the Meet and Greet. Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance has already signed on as our first guest speaker of 2012.

The talk after the con has been something amazing – so much that it brought tears to our eyes. So many people posted about us or contacted us directly to thank us for inspiring them to be MORE. So many people made new friends, got new opportunities, and just plain had fun last weekend. I think what we are doing can really change lives. The whole idea is to provide a cool weekend getaway that inspires you to do something awesome the rest of the year.

I’m frankly too exhausted to say much more. Someone asked me “How on Earth are we going to top this?”

Easy. The outline I have on my desk RIGHT NOW for 2012’s event already does. But you’ll have to wait a bit for that.

In the meantime, you’d better register and/or mark your calendar because you DO NOT want to miss this! We’ve already gotten registrations for 2012 within a few hours of opening reg today. We are still revamping the site, but registrations are active!

BRB, I have to get some sleep and write down all of the things I learned this year, incorporate them into process improvements for next year, send out surveys, compile that data, finalize the milestones for 2012, catch up on my comics, and send out letters to my corporate sponsors thanking them for being AWESOME AS HELL.

Somewhere in between all of that, I’ll be touring every Haunted Attraction I can get to on the East Coast. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. THAT SOMEONE IS ME. :)