Haunted Halloween Adventure At Staten Island’s Twisted Trails: Fun For All Ages, Group Sizes

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Editor’s note: For those interested in Halloween lore and legends, this article about the overhyped Irish origins of Halloween are discussed.  You can also learn about the annual Trick or Streets festivals in all of the boroughs of New York City (a new announcement should be released soon).  There will also probably be Trunk or Treat events in the coming month at various island locations, and you can also learn about the most and least popular Halloween candies by state here. And on Halloween night itself, which falls on a Friday this year for the first time in more than a decade, AMC Theaters is hosting a special double-feature night with two new acclaimed Halloween films, Hallow Road and Vincent Must Die.  See both for the price of one!  

Twisted Trails is part of the Staten Island Haunted Houses group, where you can find all of the best decorated Halloween Houses on Staten Island.

We asked the following questions of Timothy, the adventure’s co-creator and coordinator.  The adventure can be as spooky as you want it to be, and kids of all ages can find a time to come that they will enjoy.  During the daytime, it is significantly less scary, and the actors are only there at night.  Questions are in bold, answers in italics:

 

What are the characters they will encounter?  Are they ghosts, vampires, or something else?  
On actor nights, we have an average of 25 costume characters to scare guests. Some do jump scares, others have lines and interact with you. We have 27 different scenes and actors are strewn across the various scenes. Some scenes have no actors, some have 1 or 2, some have as many as 5. Actors include nurses, mental patient, witches, mortician, chop shop butchers, zombies, clowns, corn stalkers (more on them later), demons, plague doctor, sewer monster, pirates, vampires, and a creepy doll. 
Is the goal of the actors to scare people?  
Some scare, some interact, some are even silly! Our clown actress will shoot her fog cannon at guests making Smokey rings that kids love to try to catch and pop. Similarly near the witch house, the witch is always brewing up some fobbles (fog bubbles) that kids love to pop. Our asylum girls put on a great performance as the mental patient tries to escape from her cage but the nurse won’t let her- usually! We posted a video of them 2 days ago and between TikTok and YouTube they got over 3 million views and counting. In the maze, the corn stalker actors try to scare you the most. You walk through a dark maze with only a candle to light your path. They will jump scare you – the maze always has the most screams from guests. 
What are the options for kids or adults that don’t want to get scared but still want to experience the trails?  Your site says, for a middle ground experience: “Take the trail at night, interact with some actors, and skip the most intense scenes like the Corn Stalkers Maze. ”   Are the trails clearly marked as being more or less intense? 
My wife and I are both teachers and part of our daily job is to differentiate our lessons for our students to help meet them at their level. We applied this theory to our Halloween trail as well. The Corn Stalkers maze, which is the scariest part, is completely optional! As you approach the maze, a helper will be there to guide you on the correct path- go left to skip the maze, or take a candle from her and head to the right to go into the maze. There is also a sign posted explaining your options. We call it the “split decision”. If you go through the maze, the exit lets you back out right next to where you entered – this is good for 2 reasons – first of all, you don’t miss any other scenes by going into the maze; you continue right where the people who went left would go. The second reason is if your party is split, where some want to go into the maze and some do not, there is a waiting area with benches for you to wait for your friends to come out of the maze and then reunite to continue the trail together.  We also have NO actor nights where you can do the entire trail including the candle light maze without worrying about being scared by live actors at all. And for the least scary experience, we offer a daytime walk with no actors as well.
Is there something guests would do to indicate to the actors that they don’t want to interact? 
We used to give glow bracelets and actors would back off from anyone wearing one. We stopped doing that for numerous reasons. Instead, we just made it that you can skip over the scariest actors part. 
You can view the video above for a preview of what you might encounter, including scenes with a few of the actors who jump out and some of the animatronics characters.  Photos are included at the end, as well as the map, which can also be viewed below.
Upon searching for Staten Island Haunted Houses on Instagram, the following image shows the Meta AI result for this search: 
Banner Image: Entrance to Twisted Trails adventure. Image Credit – Twisted Trails

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