Leaderboard

As full time Supervisor of Admissions during that time, I can confirm how things were done. We did use wristbands during the upcharge years of FearFest. Wristbands were originally available at the General Admission booths, at the Return Visit booth inside the park next to Keyhole Photo and we also had associates in the park selling wristbands out of aprons. The first year, as the weeks went on and the popularity of FearFest became apparent, we expanded sales into the Season Pass Sales windows and Big Booth (the Group Sales building) and had people selling them from aprons outside the front gate too. Once FearFest started, you had to have a wristband in order to get in line for rides and enter the haunts. Close to the time of FearFest opening (an hour before?) we set up bicycle rack barricades inside the front gate along with signs directing guests to exit through the old season pass gate. No exiting was permitted through the front gate once the barricades were set up; that was to free up the front gate as an entrance only so we could have a smooth flow of traffic, in through the front gate and out through the season pass gate. Once it was clear that the main flow of regular park guests exiting the park and the main flow of FearFest guests entering the park was over, the barricades were removed and the front gate operated as normal. At no time was the park entirely cleared then people have to re-enter for FearFest. That idea was rejected due to it being a logistical nightmare.

Pretty cool article about Haunt prep: https://www.cincinnati.com/picture-gallery/entertainment/2018/09/20/halloween-haunt-see-how-kings-island-preps-scares/1366305002/

I think a 8,000’ Giga would cost less than that.

Considering KI already announced them this year I don’t think they will announce them next year.

Kings Island just tweeted out a new picture of the site!

Halloween Haunt Opens this Friday at Kings Island Two New Scare Zones, New Indoor Maze and New Show Highlight Haunt’s 12th Season Roller coasters won’t be the only attractions conjuring up screams this fall at Kings Island. Halloween Haunt returns to the 364-acre amusement park this Friday. The popular annual event marks its 12th season with two new scare zones, a new indoor maze and new show. Halloween Haunt is open Friday and Saturday nights through October 27. Tickets are available online at visitkingsisland.com for as low as $31.99 when purchased in advance. Dates: Running every Friday and Saturday night through October 27. Attractions: The 12th annual Halloween Haunt will feature 9 haunted mazes, four outdoor scare zones and three live stage shows. New for this season are two new Scare Zones: Pumpkin Eater and Coney Maul; new indoor maze, C.H.A.O.S.; and new show, Haunted Homecoming. Plus, experience hundreds of sinister clowns, ghouls, vampires, werewolves and zombies lurking in the shadows throughout the park. Rides: More than 20 rides also are open, including Banshee, Diamondback, The Beast and Mystic Timbers. Save Money: Tickets are as low as $31.99 when purchased online and in advance at visitkingsisland.com. Admission is free with a Gold Pass. When guests purchase a 2019 Gold Pass, it also includes unlimited visits to 2018’s Halloween Haunt and WinterFest. Save Time: Guests looking to make the most of their night at Halloween Haunt can add Fright Lane to bypass waiting in line to experience each of the haunted mazes once. Fright Lane is available for purchase online or at the park. No Boo For You: For guests who may be a little hesitant to experience Halloween Haunt, Kings Island offers a “No-Boo” necklace. The monsters may still interact with the wearer of a No-Boo necklace, but won’t attempt to scare them. A No-Boo necklace can be purchased at select locations throughout the park or online for $12.15 What are you looking forward to the most this year at Haunt? Haunt Broll.mp4

By 2035, Saudi Arabia will own Ohio.

Is there going to be on ride photos for the Antique Cars? If so that would be awesome. Kings Island did a great job bringing this back, my whole family is excited for this return!

Thanks for clarifying! I still like the original Fear Fest logo over the Haunt logo.

People come to KI’s Haunt because that’s all they know. They don’t know a good haunt attraction when they see one because they’ve been conditioned to the same crap that KI puts out year after year. That being said, it’s still not as bad as the USS Nightmare.

Gator, thanks for the info. I had forgotten some of those things...it brought back nice memories.

I will try and do a few FB Live videos tomorrow night from the park. Make sure you are following us on FB to get the notifications! https://www.facebook.com/kingsislandcentral/

A freshly paved parking lot. *Slaps self to awake from my dream.

I think that's a really cool idea!!!

Just price increases...

So excited!!! We will be there tomorrow rain or shine! Hoping the rain holds off though! Its going to be an Erie night!

These are old numbers that @malem had posted a while ago. If you go by the numbers of 2014, Vortex is the 5th most ride at the park with a ridership of a little over a million- compare that to Firehawk which has nearly half of Vortex's ridership. I wonder if capacity would improve on Firehawk if they shaded the break run and only used one side of the station.

Fear Fest was a separate charge in 2000, 2001 and 2002. I did not attend FearFest in 2000, but did attend in 2001 and 2002. I can confirm that they used to give you wristbands. They also used to clear out the park for the incoming Fear Fest crowds. They actually were exiting people through the old season pass holder entrance (over by the admission booths by the Kings Island Theater).

I don’t know how much I agree with that. Paramount did little to nothing to truly integrate their IPs. The quality of their mazes was generally on par with what we have now, if not a little worse. There were some highlights, mainly Curse of the Crypt, which were pretty cool. As far as the environment, fog, visuals, fire, audio, lighting, etc. the current version is miles ahead of what we had back then. Some of that can be chalked up to new technology being available now. Speaking of Curse of the Crypt, for those who don’t know, it was a maze that was in the back of the games building - to the left as you enter X Base. One of the signature features was a part where guests would be forced to crawl and wouldn’t know that they were on dark plexiglass. At a certain point, the lights would come on exposing a faced up actor who you would be nearly face to face with, covered in real hissing cockroaches. Curse of the Crypt was retired following the 2004 season.

The first year of Fearfest used primarily mazes and props that were rented (not bought) from the failed Madison Scare Garden attraction. After the first immense success of the first year, the park decided to continue the event using both internal design and the help of some outside firms.

Here’s an interesting fact for today; At the innagural Fearfest, one of the attractions was a Haunt on the Eiffel Tower’s 264’ observation deck. A feature that never came to fruiting was that several of the steel decks of the flooring were going to be replaced with very transparent fiberglass, so you could see straight down the structure to the ground. Unfortunatly, the Ohio Department of Agriculture required that any modification to the “ride” be approved by the original manufacturer - Intamin AG of Zurich, Switzerland. Unfortunatly, time and red tape got the best of the idea and it was delayed. Ultimately, the entire Haunt on the tower didn’t make it to year 2 and the project never saw the light of day... and likely never will. Would have been fun, though! I’ll try to give you a historical Haunt/FF fact each day leading up to Haunt’s opening. There’s a lot you may not know.

Thanks for the bump... I'll maybe have to create an updated version without the broken links and with all the information in a single post. Haunt is still my favorite time of year at the park, even if I haven't had the chance to attend as frequently as I used to.

I have mixed feelings on the Skeleton Key experiences. In Sorority House having a person "disappear" and rejoin the group was novel, but honestly in the confusion of actually going through the house no one seemed to notice when one person was gone until they reappeared. "Incinerating" an infected patient in Urgent Scare probably would have worked better if they didn't rejoin the group in the next room. In Kill Mart they had you reach into spaghetti the first year, which was a trick done a million times over. They changed it afterwards but two different times that I did it the actors weren't ready when we came in, so it kind of ruined the scare. The one for Madam Fatale with the snakes was good but had nothing to do with the theme. The Slaughter House one was the first one I ever did. I had no idea what to expect. When the chainsaw guys appeared and the girl I was with disappeared - only to be found in a fetal position in the corner - it may have been the best Haunt moment I'd ever had.

Well, at the stroke of Midnight, my ride warrior will have a birthday

Viagra's Eiffel Tower.

Dollar Hours!

I'm not sure which particular animals the building in question housed, but as far as I know - there were still two animal keeps still standing (along with a few other random structures) as of a few years ago. The building in these photographs was mainly used as storage and accessible via a very eroded and overgrown pathway. For years after the first Winterfest revival was cancelled, it was used to store a ton of WF decorations that never made it into that crappy haunt thing with mean Santa. It also had several of those classic HB benches that were installed circa 2001 and removed for Nickelodeon Universe. The heaters for the animals were still hanging from the rafters the last time I was in there. A second pen, known as "The Bolt Barn," was just up the hill from Son of Beast and had most of the surrounding brush and trees removed. It was also somewhat renovated. Inside were aisles upon aisles of tools and parts specifically used to maintain Son of Beast. The pond itself is very random to see in person, but still cool, and behind Adventure Express on the hillside there were (was, maybe with Banshee now there) some other structures. I think they may have been some sort of stations with phones. The former monorail maintenance shed (which could house one train indoors on special track and allow maintenance staff to work underneath) eventually became part of the facilities for Steel Coaster Maintenance. In the yard out front, that once was the switch track for the monorail, several things were stored there such as FoF's original OTSR trains (at least one of them). Underneath all the random stuff you could still find a monorail footing or two. Hope that helps @Bansheeback, I've got photographs somewhere.

How about something like this.

Congrats you're the first one to make a turn around and it's not even built yet.

Your right, I guess I don't mind our generations fads that much. But coming from a teenager, what I HATE most about this generation is what kids do and say nowadays. Trying to be cool and/or funny by cussing, flipping the bird, replying to everything that goes wrong with, "that's retarded" or "that's gay". Ugh, I can't stand teenagers like this... I can't stand when people that I am with feel like they need to yell OMFG! (Using the real words) when we are on a ride. I feel embarrassed because it could be Adventure Express and Kids and Parents are behind us. Then they think I am an Idiot. I also hate it when in line for a ride and some parent will be cussing out their 10 or 11 year-old kid for one little unsignificant mistake they made. Sometimes I wanna say to the parent (but I don't), "Hey, your at an amusement park, just have fun! and don't ruin it for your kid by making them feel bad." I always feel really bad for these kids. As a parent with two young children, I am a REAL POOR SPORT when I hear, what I would call, intense recreational profanity. Especially in places like... oh, say- Planet Snoopy. Some people just can't have a sentence without saying "f'in" this, etc... it's almost like an adjective to them. As far as my desire for people to use proper English (and not sound stupid) I equate it to sports figures saying "y'know" ever sentence- sometimes twice a sentence. Next time you watch a sports interview count how many times the sports figure says that in a minute. Drives me nuts. But as far as profanity goes- I'm a poor sport and have no problems bringing it to a perpetrators attention, be it a parent or brood of teens.

^ Not to seem rude, but says who? By being "decent at best," is that supposed to mean that no one truly loved them?

Sure it did. And it didn't fit the theme. But it didn't physically destroy the image of the area. A little cave tucked away in the back corner, with plants all around it? Not quite as distracting as a giant red roller coaster that is added at the expense of a beautiful lake, trees throughout the entire area, blasts right through the center of "town" and more. And until Diamondback changed the foliage in the area, the Tomb Raider show-building was very much removed from view for those actually in Rivertown (and even on that note, if Paramount had built a full fiberglass Indian temple around it, wouldn't you complain even more that it ruined Rivertown?) In other words, I certainly don't agree that Tomb Raider: The Ride destroyed the purpose of Rivertown (isolation, nature, shade, relaxation, water rides) moreso than Diamondback... The Roller Coaster Philosopher site pretty much details exactly what I thought - that Diamondback, like all of Cedar Fair's additions, acts as a big carnival ride, intrinsically built to be bigger, flashier, and noisier than anything else in the park. It's the only roller coaster at Kings Island that crosses over a midway; the only one that's not set off into the woods; the only one that's visible from most everywhere in the park, and purposefully so. For better or worse, that's how Cedar Fair constructs their rides, and its very clear that their goal was dominance of the area. Rumor has it that B&M offered a hypercoaster to Paramount and they turned it down? We can see why... It changed the whole feel of the area. Not that today's crowd cares much about that sort of thing...

Paramount made mistakes, yes. But to say they destroyed the theme of Kings Island? Pick your battles, people... Did they corporatize the park? Sure. But when we had rides like Tomb Raider, Flight of Fear, Top Gun (in its early years) even The Italian Job: Stunt Track... Don't even try to tell me the park didn't emphasize theme. Until Diamondback, Rivertown was an absolutely beautiful part of the park, one of the better "Western-y, frontier-y" areas I've seen, with a beautiful "secluded" feel. Though I love Diamondback, you'd be lying if you said that Rivertown is anything more than an open plaza with a little concrete lake in the center. They didn't even bother to replant the trees that they tore out - there's about three dogwood trees around the splashdown, nothing more. So the area will stay that way. Action Zone sucks, yes. But I actually appreciate the idea behind it. The "movie backlot" theme with the concrete and the bright colors and the targets and the movie posters. Even the "Stunt Crew Grill" is themed to a commissary where we, as the stunt actors, can eat. Yes, the park lost a lot of its original charm when it was bought by a large corporation. Guess what? That would've happened no matter what. If the park was owned by KECO right up until Cedar Fair bought it in 2006, it would just now start losing that themeing, but it would lose it just the same. What it comes down to is, without every single owner Kings Island has had, we wouldn't have the park we have today. Maybe for the better, or maybe for the worse, but without Lindler, KECO, Paramount, things just would not be the way they are.

Nope! From the Cedar Point website: http://www.cedarpoin...ts/policies.cfm Did you REALLY think they'd miss out on the chance to charge you for food? http://www.thefreedi...m/European+plan Free continental breakfast would be Continental Plan: http://www.thefreedi...ontinental+plan A free FULL breakfast would be the Bermuda Plan: http://www.thefreedi...om/Bermuda+plan And, of course, if ALL meals were included, that would be the seldom heard of these days American Plan: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/American+plan Terp, who suddenly feels very, very old

And, since you didn't list it, you will never know! Terp, who for quite some time had as his favorite wooden coaster at Kings Island one Fairly Odd Coaster...honest...

No, but I think you'd be surprised how many, including people here, DO love Surf Dog...