Warning – the information below might best be viewed through your fingers.
That’s because it pertains to the petrifying. Namely, a website that identifies attractions across Canada and the U.S that specialise in giving visitors frighteningly good times.
Findahaunt.com, run by the Haunted Attraction Association, provides an interactive digital map of North America, which you can click on to identify your attraction of choice. It’s a definitive directory of haunted houses, hayrides, haunted trails, pumpkin patches and escape rooms for those tired of sugar-coated theme parks.
Jersey boys: A mad axe man, the grandson of evil farmer Frank, greets visitors to Field of Terror in East Windsor, New Jersey. With relatives like him, it is no wonder that his grandfather decided to dabble with science in a bid to create plant/human hybrids in a story of mutation gone horrifyingly wrong
Findahaunt.com, run by the Haunted Attraction Association, provides an interactive digital map of North America, which you can click on to identify your horror attraction of choice
MailOnline Travel scoured the site for frights and uncovered plenty of attractions that will please horror fans.
There’s the Field of Terror in East Windsor, New Jersey, for instance, which tells the story of farmer Frank, who tired of agriculture and turned his hand to creating human/plant hybrids in his laboratory and ended up with mutations evocative of the blood-guzzling plant Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors.
Field of Terror’s four attractions promise visitors encounters with zombies and Frank the farmer’s grandson-turned-mad-axe-man.
Bad genes: An escapee from the 288 Scare Factory in Rosharon, Texas, which is meant to be a genetic research facility gone awry, presents the scariest of US propositions – bad dentistry
Creepy Hollow Haunted House in Texas is equally beguiling.
Here, in Rosharon, you get three haunted houses for the price of one.
Trading on the not entirely unfounded and familiar fear of scientific advances that have fallen into the wrong hands, it features the 288 Scare Factory, a mobile viral genetic research facility gone awry, The Dark Woods, an area of dense forest behind it, and Pitch Black, a holding facility adjacent to the factory.
Home on the range: A forbidding figure in a rocking chair surrounded by taxidermy, animal skulls, a manacled woman and a knife-wielding figure at the Guinness World Record-winning Factory of Terror in Canton, Ohio
Meanwhile, for the fearless and intrepid, Ohio boasts an attraction that has three times won the Guinness World Record for the longest indoor haunted attraction.
The Factory of Terror in Canton features five attractions and is more than a mile long.
The heart-stopping journey takes in The Asylum, Industrial Nightmare, the Labyrinth of Darkness, Massacre on Mahoning and the House of Nightmares. If that’s not enough, there are also six escape rooms.
Out of this world: Extra-terrestrials await visitors at the longest’s indoor haunted attraction, Factory of Terror, which is more than a mile long and boasts five attractions – or, more aptly, repulsions
For those of a similarly strong constitution, there is Fear Fair.
The more than 50,000-square-foot venue, in Seymour, Indiana, promises to lead visitors to discover their deepest fears.
A blood-curdling cocktail of sets, animatronics and actors combine for what is billed as a ride through your darkest nightmares.
I want my mummy: A duo of bandaged nurses are among the everyday characters-turned-monsters in the Fear Fair cast, which promises to lead visitors to discover their deepest fears
The journey from Hell: What should be a casual experience on the innocent, iconic yellow school bus is interrupted by a phantom at Fear Fair for a ride through your darkest nightmares
In a nod to the infamous ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy, from a similarly named film, the Field of Screams, in Mountville, Pennsylvania, draws in the punters with four different attractions.
The venue breathes life into an abomination of horror favourites, including the walking dead, asylum patients run amok, sinister clowns and the inevitable ghosts.
They inhabit a landscape that takes visitors on a tour through cornfields, concealing ill-meaning voyeurs and a man with a chainsaw, on to fog-filled shrinking tunnels, graveyards, clown-infested playgrounds and ending in the aptly named Ghost Town.
Killer appeal: The Deadwood Cemetery is alive with walking dead. Asylum patients, clowns and ghosts hover elsewhere
Skull-king around: A reliquary of skeletons joins the stock characters at Field of Dreams where the walking dead, asylum patients run amok, sinister clowns and the inevitable ghosts join forces to prowl around the vicinity
What could be more American than apple pie? Baseball, of course, which conjures up a picture of innocence and family time spent amicably together, enjoying treats such as hot dogs, soda and pretzels.
Not so at exFEARience, in Niles, Ohio – a venue that invites visitors to ponder what happens in a baseball stadium after the lights go out.
One can only imagine what there is to behold in the six haunts under one roof: The Guest House, the Hunted, Isolation, Eastwood Estate, the Factory and Thorne Funeral Parlour.
Gripping yarn: An ambitious zombie claws her way upstairs at exFEARience, which offers six haunts – The Guest House, the Hunted, Isolation, Eastwood Estate, the Factory and Thorne Funeral Parlour
Blood, blood, glorious blood: exFEARience, in Niles, Ohio, invites visitors to ponder what happens in a baseball stadium after the lights go out – this kind of behaviour apparently, evoking notions of what might happen if you put too much ketchup on your hot dog or, worse still, you chance your arm in the US without an adequate health insurance policy
In notoriously witch-obsessed New England, the spookily named Sinking Spring is home to Shocktoberfest.
The property, based in Pennsylvania – which had its first and only witch trial in 1863, nine years before the infamous Salem, Massachusetts cases – is said to offer eight killer experiences including a haunted hayride, tapping into the state’s eerie quality.
A zombie bus, laid on by the operator – which has been in the business for almost 30 years – transports groups of visitors, on request, if they dare.
Grim reapers: A creepy posse of comatose farmers at Shocktoberfest which visitors – if they dare – may reach by zombie bus
The last straw: The haunted hayride at Shocktoberfest in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, taps into an eerie quality that lingers in the state’s atmosphere. having held its own witch trials nine years before the infamous cases heard in Salem, Massachusetts
Louisiana is a state with a long-held reputation for voodoo and hoodoo, courtesy of its entrenched Roman Catholic tradition and a melting pot of nationalities, and nowhere better is that realised than at the 13th Gate Haunted House in Baton Rouge.
Billed the ‘ultimate haunted house’, its bewildering cast of characters might leave you wondering whether this might – as a literal interpretation of ‘ultimate’ suggests – be your last.
Operator Midnight Productions has been frightening folk since 1994 and opened the 13th Gate in 2002. To mark a decade of spooking at this venue, it added Necropolis 13, the delightful 40,000-square-foot cemetery complete with more than 400 zombie-infested crypts and mausoleums, nightly voodoo shows and underground catacombs, just across the street from its main haunt.
In stitches: A severely scarred monster menaces at the 13th Gate Haunted House in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, billed as ‘ultimate’ in its category. Let’s hope it’s not, quite literally, your last visit