Knott’s Scary Farm 2025

[Rideguy70]

I know there's nothing Halloween for Calico Mine Train--while I haven't seen for myself, I'm 95% certain I heard a reliable social media source note it had nothing this year.

Admittedly, I'm not sure about Log Ride... there may be the Halloween Hootenanny, but I'm speaking about the fact the ride won't have live scareactors.

 

[April]

So far we are experiencing the mazes severely understaffed compared to last year. It’s definitely much different. Eight Fingers Nine was a much stronger run than last year though but that’s really been the only stand out so far.

Can anyone speak to why like some mazes get backed up when they’re a 5 minute wait? Like we’ve done room 13 3 years in a row now and every time it’s a dull and slow conga line walk through where we stop in almost every scene for a bit. Chilling chambers was also a slow walk through as well and we hit it like right at 7pm so I don’t think it would’ve been a cast change? I don’t think that affects mazes here?

Also, we did the boofet and we were taken to Murphys instead of the normal restaurant which seems like they should be transparent that you may end up there? The last two years we had been in the main one and had been served drinks and had consistent table clearing. It was just very chaotic in there with the tables close together and every time we got food it was barely warm, some of it even bordering cold despite the crowds. When we got there around 5 there was one scareactor prowling around. It did improve as several scareactors showed up, but that just made it worse for walking around the narrow pathways.

 

[Spookies n' Stuff]

Can anyone speak to why like some mazes get backed up when they’re a 5 minute wait? Like we’ve done room 13 3 years in a row now and every time it’s a dull and slow conga line walk through where we stop in almost every scene for a bit. Chilling chambers was also a slow walk through as well and we hit it like right at 7pm so I don’t think it would’ve been a cast change? I don’t think that affects mazes here?

Combination of factors. One is layout of the mazes, the length, flow, size of the space etc all affect how people walk through and where bottlenecks form, etc. Another is line pulsing, Room 13 in particular has had an issue where I believe its capacity is lower than most other mazes because of the space its taking up inside a permanent building that also operates as an attraction during the day, so no matter what the line backs up more than is proportional to the number of guests arriving, usually resulting in queue hosts being forced to push through as many people as possible to keep the wait down.
Another, and possibly the most common, is guests just stop or get lost sometimes. Any scareactor or blackout can tell you at least a handful of stories of guests going through an emergency exit by accident, and everyone behind them following them thinking it's the correct path, leading to a traffic jam when those people realize they all went the wrong way. Room 13 in particular also doesn't have a lot of structured scares and boo holes, which in turn tends to lead to the scareactors getting in the way of the path to some extent, which makes guests slow down or outright stop.

 

[Spookies n' Stuff]

Apologies for double posting but got curious,
Has anyone seen any new props/headstones added for Chilling Chambers? I know they added them last year for The Depths and Dark Entities, but I hadn't seen anyone pointing out anything from Wax Works or Bloodlines yet.

 

[Freak]

Just remembered I didn't write a review of everything from opening night! I'll keep it short. Some spoilers abound.

The Zoo: Some cool effects in this house and the bird flying overhead was a really great scareactor effect! It was kinda cool. I think I prefer it with the lights out, but even then, there were some lights on that I feel like there wasn't supposed to. Also I hope they change the flashlight policy to one per party because there were too many flashlights going off, ruining the house a bit.

Mary: Call me crazy, but I think I prefer this over the Zoo. I feel like this is Knott's trying to be more like HHN, but I feel like in a good way. I actually got a good runthrough in here and there were some good spots for the actors to hide. It was great to finally see an "upside down" room that HHN Orlando does finally designed here on the West Coast (And provided a great scare!) I'll go against the popular consensus here and say this was a well-designed house. I know several people disagreed with me here.

Saw the Hanging and it was....eh. Feel like it's just getting weaker. Hanging a Labubu? Can you get more milktoast than that??

All of the other houses were fine. I just didn't get a great runthrough of a lot of houses. I'll go back on the fourth and see if I can get a better runthrough, but for now, I'm kinda underwhelmed this year. I guess the effects of the merger are finally kicking in?