Ohio’s Most Popular Haunted Houses, and How We Started Paying to Be Scared
Two Ohio haunts made a national top-10 list this fall. The business behind them grew out of Depression-era basement parties, a Cincinnati charity haunt and a lot of empty Victorian houses.
Two of the 13 scariest haunted attractions in the country this year are in Ohio, according to Hauntworld, an industry site that ranks haunts every fall. The Dent Schoolhouse in Cincinnati placed second and the Factory of Terror in Canton eighth on the list published Oct. 7. FOX 32 Chicago’s roundup of the season’s top attractions, built from Hauntworld and two other industry rankings, put them in the same spots on Oct. 23.
They are the headliners in a state with hundreds of haunts, from theme-park mazes to volunteer-run trails behind fire halls. Here is where Ohio goes to be scared, and how a 1930s attempt to keep kids from vandalizing the neighborhood turned into an industry.
The big names
The Dent Schoolhouse, Cincinnati. Set in an 1894 schoolhouse on the city’s west side, the Dent celebrates its 30th season this year, Hauntworld reported. Its story centers on a janitor named Charlie McFree; this season adds a character called Mr. Shady, a rebuilt basement and a new finale with spiders and werewolves, according to Hauntworld.
Factory of Terror, Canton. Hauntworld describes it as one of the largest indoor haunted houses in the world and says it has been recognized by Guinness World Records three times. It is marking 25 years and covers more than a mile of walkthrough, with a new attraction, Grimm Woods, this season.
Lake EERIE Fearfest, Geneva. The Northeast Ohio haunt bills itself as the state’s top haunted house based on a Haunted Attraction Magazine ranking, according to a 2026 guide from Haunt Harvester, which says it has also appeared on a Forbes top-10 list.
Blood Prison, Mansfield. Staged inside the Ohio State Reformatory, the 1886 prison where The Shawshank Redemption was filmed, Blood Prison is ranked among the country’s scariest haunts by several national publications, Haunt Harvester reported.
The Haunted Hydro, Fremont. Now in its 36th year, it runs inside a century-old hydroelectric plant, according to Haunt Harvester.
The Haunted Schoolhouse and Laboratory, Akron. Open since 1974, it is one of the oldest continuously operating haunts in the state, according to Wikipedia’s history of haunted attractions.
Kings Island Halloween Haunt, Mason. The park’s after-dark event runs seven haunted mazes and four scare zones this year, including a new Friday the 13th maze, JASON: Blood Reign, according to Haunted Attraction Network. The Conjuring: Beyond Fear costs extra on top of the Haunted Attractions Pass.
Closer to home
The Dayton area has its own heavy hitters. Land of Illusion in Middletown says its haunted trail is the longest and scariest in the Midwest. Lewisburg Haunted Cave sends visitors about 80 feet underground into a real cave. The Riverside Jaycees have run the Haunted Castle of Carnage since 1986, entirely with volunteers, and Dayton Scream Park on Valley Pike is marking its 25th season, according to Dayton Local’s listings. In Wilmington, Brimstone Haunt’s new maze this year, The Boogeyman, is set in a Victorian house in the 1960s. That is not a coincidence, as the next two sections explain. Dates, hours and prices for local haunts are in the list on our front page.
Where the haunted house came from
Paid frights are older than Halloween haunts. In London, Marie Tussaud’s wax figures of the guillotined, first shown in 1802, became her permanent Chamber of Horrors, according to Smithsonian magazine. In 1915 an English fairground in Liphook, Hampshire, opened the Orton and Spooner “ghost house,” one of the first purpose-built horror attractions. It was steam-powered, and it still survives at the Hollycombe Steam Collection, according to Wikipedia.
The American Halloween haunt came out of the Great Depression. By the 1930s Halloween pranks had escalated into vandalism and property damage, so parents and civic groups threw parties to keep teenagers busy. Families decorated basements and led guests from house to house; a 1937 party pamphlet described “trails of terror,” Smithsonian reported. Halloween historian Lisa Morton told the magazine that cities were trying to “buy these kids off.” Trick-or-treating took hold in the same years.
The modern business started in 1969. Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion opened Aug. 9 that year and drew 82,516 guests in a single day soon after, according to Wikipedia. Morton told Smithsonian that the opening marked the start of the haunted attraction industry.
Ohio helped spread it. The Jaycees, the young men’s civic group, turned haunted houses into charity fundraisers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, often in abandoned buildings. The first Jaycees haunt recognized by the national office was the WSAI Haunted House in Cincinnati, run by the Sycamore-Deer Park Jaycees in 1970, according to Wikipedia. Knott’s Berry Farm opened its Halloween event in 1973. In 1984 a fire at the Haunted Castle at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey killed eight teenagers. Stricter fire codes followed, which pushed many volunteer haunts out and opened the field to for-profit operators. The Riverside Jaycees’ haunt is one of the volunteer operations that survived.
Analysis: why the haunted house is Victorian, and what the Depression had to do with it
Ask anyone to draw a haunted house and you will get turrets, gables, a sagging porch and a broken window: a Victorian. The reasons, according to architectural historians and critics, are as much economic as aesthetic.
Those houses were built in the late 1800s as status symbols for new industrial money. After World War I, critics began calling them “wooden monstrosities,” and painters such as Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield made them look lonely and unsettling in the 1920s, according to an essay in Scientific American’s blog network drawing on the art historian Sarah Burns. By the 1930s and 1940s American taste had swung to the simpler Colonial Revival. Wealthy families moved out, and the old houses were left to decay or were cut up into rooming houses.
The Great Depression made it worse. The construction of Victorian houses had largely ended before 1929, so the Depression did not stop that boom so much as freeze the housing that boom left behind. Single-family construction in the U.S. peaked in 1925, and there was “very little construction” from 1930 to 1934, economists Michael Brocker and Christopher Hanes wrote in a 2014 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research. House prices fell about 20% from 1930 to 1934, by their measure.
That is The Despoiler’s reading of the evidence: when almost nothing new was being built and almost no one could afford to heat, repair or sell a 15-room house, the big Victorians did not get torn down, replaced or restored. They aged in place, boarded up or subdivided, through the same decade that showing off wealth became distasteful. The A.V. Club, summarizing a Vox video essay, made the same point: after the war and the Depression, the abandoned mansions came to stand for a gaudier past and for death.
Hollywood and cartoonists noticed. Through the 1930s, horror filmmakers set their stories in dark, creaking old houses. Charles Addams began drawing his macabre family in a crumbling mansion for The New Yorker in 1938, and Alfred Hitchcock put Norman Bates in one in Psycho in 1960. Forbes Home notes that the houses’ long halls, attics and towers, along with the parlor séances some Victorian families held, already gave them a ghostly reputation. Neglect supplied the cobwebs.
The Miami Valley still has plenty of the originals. The Greene County Historical Society runs paranormal tours of the Trebein-Flynn Victorian house in Xenia this week, according to Dayton Local, and haunts like Brimstone keep building fake ones.
Know a haunt we missed? Send a tip.