New List: Best Haunted Houses, Plus a Ghost Tour Guide
Seven ticketed scare attractions ranked with Fear Columbus on top, and a companion guide to ghost walks, cemetery nights and lantern tours. Status: Live on site.
Halloween is less than three weeks out, and two new pages on the site now cover both kinds of scary October night. The first is a ranking, Best Haunted Houses in Columbus, Ohio, which sorts seven ticketed attractions we confirmed are running this season. The second is a long companion read, Haunted Columbus: Ghost Tours and Spooky History, for anyone who would rather hear the story than get chased through it.
Fear Columbus on Northland Plaza Drive earned Best Overall. The building that used to house 13th Floor is now run by local operators, and this year it holds three new walkthroughs on a single timed ticket: Shadow Pines, Dearly Departed: Critical Conditions and Oddballs Show Stopper. Its season also runs longer than most, to Sunday, November 1.
The six finalists spread out across the map. Blood Prison stages a 40 to 50 minute route inside the Ohio State Reformatory cell blocks in Mansfield. Haunted Hoochie at Dead Acres in Pataskala is the adults-only contact option. Kings Island adds a JASON: Blood Reign maze to Halloween Haunt in Mason, and The Haunt Columbus on Refugee Road puts two themed houses on one $30 general ticket. Brimstone Haunt in Wilmington is marking its tenth season, and the list closes with the Haunted Ohio Statehouse Tours, $16 lantern nights for ages 12 and up on October 16, 17, 23 and 24.
The guide takes the quieter route. It walks through the Columbus Ghost Tours lineup, whose stories come from Haunted Cemeteries of Ohio author E.R. "Bucky" Cutright. That includes a German Village walk leaving Schiller Park at 6 p.m. on those same four Friday and Saturday dates, an after-hours night at Green Lawn Cemetery for adults, and a $35 investigation inside Thurber House, the house James Thurber lived in as a student. It also covers The Arcane Foundry's haunted fitness hikes through the Walhalla ravine in Clintonville and other neighborhoods, plus a clearly marked day trip to the Reformatory.
With October 31 landing on a Saturday, the guide's calendar points out that the Statehouse nights and the German Village walk both end October 24, so late planners should look at the downtown walks and investigations instead. The ranking is filed under the new Activities group on the Best Of index. For orchards, pumpkin patches and Boo at the Zoo, our fall in Columbus guide handles the daylight hours, and the North Side page has more near Fear Columbus.
