Haunted House
Alton Towers

Following the purchase of Alton Towers, Tussauds had to prove to their local government that they were capable of submitting planning applications, and be proficient enough to stick to the credentials detailed in them. Indeed, Alton Towers have a hard enough time as it is building new rides due chiefly to the traffic that could be generated and the noise engendered by the ride.

Therefore, whilst various rides have been added, some have been removed. Katanga Canyon and Gloomy Wood opened in 1992 as part of a double deal with German manufacturer Mack and completely rewrote the nature of the park turning it from a fair in the woods to one of the nations most highly regarded parks.

Of all the areas in the park, Gloomy Wood is the smallest. It consists of merely one shop, one eatery and the Haunted House. From Katanga Canyon, Gloomy Wood falls roughly halfway along the wooded path leading to Forbidden Valley, home to Nemesis.

As you weave through the woodland, down a hill, you approach two cylindrical brick columns topped by slate-coned roofs. To the left the aging house that forms the entrance to the Haunted House and in front, the Witches Kitchen which is the purveyor of, strangely, nachos among other things.

If you turn 180 degrees to the left, the entrance to the Haunted House is via a woodland cemetery. Each gravestone tells a story in the form of a limerick, and is normally worth a smirk if nothing else. The path leads you around the back of the Runaway Mine Train before turning back and heading towards the house, through a derelict brick tower and up to the base of the house.

The house is old with cracking bricks, missing tiles and clouded windows. Ivy creeps up the side of the house, as rust stains the redbrick walls. Some steps lead up to the porch, and it is through the open door that you enter.

In the hallway of this house, the wallpaper peels from the walls, cobwebs hang from the lanterns as a chandelier flickers above a dust-covered table. The air is musty and thick, and family portraits scare you into thinking that not all is right.

The atmosphere is ambient. And then interrupting the dark music is a really stupid, pointless addition that only makes you cringe. A voice with the wit of a DFS advert goes through a pointless spiel of puns and epigrams saying mindless things such as 'I am you host - your GHOST host'. Funny? No. Unnerving? Most definitely not. You move on as quickly as possible into the next room.

As you do, your senses are thrown as the hall has sunk by about 15 degrees on one side. To your left, a books page turns over on its own, a face in a fire warns of forthcoming dangers, and to your right, one of the cleverest illusions has the ghost of a girl and her cat possessing a dolls house.

As you go through the door, you enter a lobby with family busts lining the wall and yet more chandeliers above. Through the centre, constant streams of cars pass. Each is wood finished and seats two rows of three, the back row is tiered to ensure everyone gets a face full of the horrors that lurk.

As the car passes under a curtain, the bar lowers and you go further into the darkness. As you do so, above is an angled, spiked port cullice with skulls of inauspicious visitors on some of the spikes.

The light dims further, the car slaloms through a small maze of walls as flashes of light strobe from the cracks before you turn sharply to the right past a statue and into a marble floored ballroom.

As you pass through two pillars, a huge ghoul swings out from above and as you turn away to the right, another swoops out from the darkness. You turn away and to the left hand side, towards an archway that crumbles out of the way at the last minute before you turn towards a gaping skeletal mouth, mirror ball eyes lighting the vault with a rotating red glow. As you enter the mouth the car slows to a crawl as you go through a long revolving tunnel, and with the crooked arch at the end, it really tricks you into thinking that the track is turning, not the tunnel.

Once at the end, the darkness continues with bats fluttering above. The car turns a few more darkened corners before entering a rather devoid and baron stretch in which fairly loud non-descript jellyfish type forms come screaming up from the ground.

As you pass a skeletal character who throws a switch on the wall, with a bolt of lightening, two skeletons fall from above, and in a flash, your picture is taken.

The car slows, and turns into a chamber with titanic and colonized cobwebs hanging from the stone walls. The car slows to a crawl as strobes light a ten-foot spider, under which you pass as it hisses belligerently.

The car here speeds up and rebounds around in the darkness, in an abiding trick from the gloom a macabre screaming face lights up before you veer away at the last minute. A bull like figure leans towards you as you burst into the garden scene.

As the car again slows, you approach a carriage stuck in a rut, the wheel turning and a funeral director beckoning you with his outstretched arm. From the coffin on board the carriage, ghost-like forms rise and disappear into the darkness as you turn away.

Through desolate and decaying graveyards, you pass more ghouls and such, and even apparently legitimate pillars turn to reveal gremlins hidden within, and as soon as you turn each corner, some ugly character will turn and jump out at you.

Past crumbling walls, under rotting verandas, below swooping ghosts and passing strange mumbling forms in the rock, your journey continues. Some effects are good, although, caustically, the newer ones are the poorer, especially where a stone head set into the ground cracks open to reveal lots of eyes and a very plastic looking tongue come out towards you.

As a dragon’s head is thrust from the wall towards your car, its mouth opens and screaming from it is a human head – a ghoulish end to a varied ride.

The theming both inside and outside is fantastic, but the Haunted House is quite a lost opportunity. It is probably fair to say that it is merely an updated version of the classic haunted houses with no effects really being either fantastic enough to make you wonder how they did it, or original enough to be a surprise.

It lacks a story line too and seems rather disjointed with some scenes in particular being rather nebulous.

It is not a bad ride though, by any stretch of the imagination. Many things work in its favour, including the fantastic cars that take you around the ride. Each seat six, and each is independent from the next. You rarely see the prevailing car, therefore you don’t feel like a commuter on an escalator, instead you feel more alone and unaware of the looming scares that lay in wait.

The way each can speed up and slow is clever, meaning more frantic pacing at times, and other opportunities to lull you into a false sense of security.

For a first ride, you may enjoy this more than even a Disney ride – many of the features inside rely on making you jump, but even when you become used to what will jump when, there is still enough to keep you coddled.

Recently, as more and more dark rides and ideas are developed, the Haunted House is being left behind. It isn’t designed to vie against multi-million pound rides such as Spiderman at Universal’s Islands of Adventure, however, it was never ground breaking, and has never had any features to make it stand forth and proclaim that is leagues ahead of the competition.

It remains an enjoyable ride, although don’t expect it to do anything different than the last Haunted House, just to do it a bit better.

Marcus Sheen