Howl-O-Scream 2010

Busch Gardens is an amusement park located in Williamsburg Virginia. Every Halloween they have a special that they call Howl-O-Scream. My mother and I are big fans of haunted attractions and we go to every one we can get tickets to. Howl-O-Scream's slogan this year is "the scare is everywhere." They put commercials on television and in local newspapers and on the radio. All of their advertisements gave the illusion that their visitors would not be able to turn around without being scared out of their shoes. We found this to be very untrue.

As visitors enter the park through the ticket booths there appear to be Victorian statues standing against walls, but as you walk by them they lunge at you. I was startled as a man in a black suit lunged at me. Being startled for that second was the most fear that I experienced throughout the night. As you pass through the ticket booths & enter the actual park there is a man, we called him crow-boy, that greets you. He has a mask over most of his face with a crows beak on it. He wears a top hat and a black suit. He is on stilts that have crows feet on the bottom. He may appear frightening to small children, but I did not see it. Other than the rides, crow-boy was the most entertaining thing in the whole park.

Howl-O-Scream hosted six haunted houses this year named: Bitten, Catacombs, Cursed, Harvest Hollow, Hunted and Revenge of Pompeii. Bitten was supposed to be about vampires, but we were both very unenthused. As we walked through the halls of the haunted house, the "actors" were just standing around having conversations with eachother. Catacombs did not even have any actors in it, all it was was walking through what was supposed to be the catacombs of France. There were actors outside of this haunted house, but they were children, very small children. We did not get to go through Cursed because the park closes at ten p.m. Harvest Hollow was not even a haunted house. It had you walking around a bunch of hay bales. Hunted was supposed to have werewolves in it. They did not run after the guests or anything. The actors actually yelled "woof" and "bark" at the guests. The Revenge of Pompeii was inside a log flume that had been shut down. It contained a lot of fog and mist, that was the only scary thing in there. The fact that you could not see a foot in front of you made you expect that something was going to surprise you, but nothing ever did.

As for the rest of the amusement park, there were less than ten actors and none of them even did their jobs. They stood around talking to eachother and never attempted to scare the parks guests. My mother and I paid $110 for our tickets, and that was with her work discount. It was a waste of money and I do not reccommend anybody spend their money to attend Howl-O-Scream.