Niles Scream Park in Berrien County, Michigan, is a 44 acre Halloween theme park, rated one of the top horror theme parks in the country. The park hosts around 100 different attractions, ranging from escape rooms to haunted mazes.

“The planning for the park takes a lot of time,” said park manager Aaron Smith. “We start the planning process for the next park as soon as the current one closes.”

At this point, we were led through the entrance of the main attraction: the haunted house.

The haunted house is complex. Once you get through the main entrance to get into the actual beginning of the house, you reach a lobby with six different doors. Each door leads into two or three more rooms. Those rooms branch out into a couple more rooms. Finally, at the very end it all funnels back to one of the two rooms at the end. Each room has its own theme, for example a shop or a circus, with details that add an extra layer to the experience.

The main entrance of the haunted house is a dusty catacomb, filled floor to ceiling with fake skulls and bones that took 6 months to put together. Around one corner is a waterfall pouring from the open mouth of a giant skull and flowing down a small pile of skulls before landing in a small pool.

“There are a lot of different rooms that go into the haunted houses. For example these catacombs took about 6 months to do, but each show takes 2 months from start to finish because of all of the details included,” Smith said.

Some of the details include multisensory sensations in the rooms. From scented rooms to moving floors and the classic props popping up into your face, the details vary. For example, in one of them there is a circus theme: picture bright colourful lights, the smell of cotton candy, and of course, clowns.

Niles Scream Park doesn’t just offer one haunted house though. While the main one is it’s most popular, there are two more heavily themed houses. The Gruesome Gallery is the name of one of them: a haunted wax museum come to life with artifacts of unknown origins and magic.

The other, Nuclear Nightmare, is set in a town struck by nuclear fallout, turning all of its inhabitants into zombies, the house being a little more prop heavy than its counterpart.

Both of these houses, however, funnel into an outdoor trail that winds through scenes like a foggy swamp that smells like sewage, or an abandoned home with objects strewn about the property. Once you make your way through the outdoor trails, you enter my personal favorite part of the experience; the bubble monster.

There is one final haunted house experience called Hooded. The name suggests exactly what occurs in the house. A hood is put over your head so the only senses you can rely on are touch, smell, and sound. This house is also the only one where the actors have the permission to touch you. On top of that, do you think you can go in with your friend to cling onto? Wrong, you must go in alone. The way you are led through the house is by holding onto a rope that guides you through the attraction. This house is also the only one where you must sign a waiver and be over 18.

Like all theme parks, there's going to be food, and this is no exception. Niles Scream Park is partnered with Jones Soda company where they turned the popular soda into a spooky themed, Witches Brew, by adding a mixer that contains a chunk of dry ice, making the drink smokey and bubbly. There’s also the classic carnival food available: corn dogs, outrageously large slushies, elephant ears, and pizza.

There’s also different photo opportunities spaced throughout the area where the food is. Some of these photo setup’s include a coffin lined with flowers, a mannequin zombie, a butt-plaque (which is exactly what it sounds like), bodies without legs or heads chained to the ceiling, and one of the infamous 12 foot skeletons with a pumpkin on its head. Along with the photo set ups, there are actors dressed up wandering through the park. Some of the actors include Death himself and a monster dressed in an old burlap robe named The Boogeyman.

Besides all of the houses, there are many other attractions such as the haunted hay-ride, escape rooms, and a field of screams.

For the escape rooms, there are 4 options that swap out yearly. This year the park hosts a gothic-style room with a coffin where you must sacrifice your partner to escape, an egyptian tomb where you must identify the mummy and put them back to sleep, a slowly sinking ship and a room where you and your partner are held after being captured by a serial killer and must try to escape. All of these rooms should only take you about 5 minutes, so to do all of them it's about 20 minutes.

The Field of Screams is an outdoor haunted house that competes with the main attraction of the park. It holds many smaller events and buildings dotted throughout the outdoor trail, which is 6/10 of a mile long and also comes with the same experiences as the regular haunted houses except they’re outside.

For example, in one section of the map you walk through a miniature funhouse. The entrance of the house was created to imitate the feeling of claustrophobia, so it’s a tunnel with big tubes of air on each side that squeeze you as you walk through. Further down the path there's a building that is completely filled with smoke, so much that you can’t see what is in front of you, and it becomes a wall-less maze.

The final ride we did was the haunted hayride. The hayride this year commemorates a member of the board of directors nicknamed ‘Betelgeuse’ who passed away, showcasing horror parodies of popular literary works like Moby Dick and Alice in Wonderland. The ride also takes popular scenes from the movies, adding actors and turning it into a creepier version of the tale.

Niles Scream Park is an attraction with a lot to offer, from the more traditional haunted houses with flickering lights, jump scares, and fog machines. Niles is an interesting place that dedicates itself to the Halloween season. If horror is something you like, then we recommend you check it out.

Video editing from James Hauke