Screeemfest at Canobie Lake Park: Six Haunts Inside a Working Amusement Park

Screeemfest is the most flexible Halloween attraction in New Hampshire, because it is not really a haunted attraction. It is an amusement park that runs six haunted houses.

That difference matters more than it sounds. (And yes — the park spells it with three E's. SCREEEMFEST officially, Screamfest to everyone who has ever typed it into a search bar. Same event.)

The 2026 season

Screeemfest is open. The park's banner as of October 2: "Screeemfest is OPEN! Tickets must be purchased online in advance!"

It should have opened a week earlier. Canobie cancelled the September 26–27 weekend for weather — "Screeemfest Postponed to 10/2 - Park Closed 9/26 & 9/27" — so the season is fourteen nights, not sixteen:

• October 2, 3, 4
• October 9, 10, 11
• October 16, 17, 18
• October 23, 24, 25
• October 30, 31

Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, with the park on evening hours throughout: 5pm–11pm on Fridays, 3pm–11pm on Saturdays, and 1pm–9pm on most Sundays. The season ends on Halloween — there are no November dates on the park's published calendar.

There is no Columbus Day night. Most of the region runs Monday October 12 — Spooky World, Factory of Terror and Scary Acres all do. Canobie's calendar marks it closed, which is the kind of gap that catches out anyone assuming the long weekend works everywhere.

Pricing is still not published. Canobie sells date-specific tickets through its own portal and shows no rate for Screeemfest nights. That is the one thing still missing, and we will not quote last year's.

Where those dates actually were

This page said "no dates" for five weeks, and it was wrong for at least some of them — which is worth saying plainly, because the reason is the most useful thing on this page.

The Screeemfest page has carried one sentence all season and still does: "Screeemfest will reopen in the Fall of 2026! See you then!" No dates, no prices, no on-sale date. Check the page named after the event and you learn nothing.

The dates are on the park's hours calendar, a different page entirely. When we first found them, September 26 read:

Park Hours: 3pm-11pm — Screeemfest Opening Day!

That is the park naming the event and the date in its own words. The rest of the season follows from the same calendar: Canobie runs 10:30am–7pm in daytime season and switches to evening hours closing at 9 to 11pm for Screeemfest. Every evening day falls on the weekday the calendar claims.

It is also where the postponement showed up, two days after it happened and before the Screeemfest page mentioned it at all. The hours calendar is the honest document here — it is the one the gate staff work from, so it is the one that gets corrected when the plan changes. That is the same reason it had the dates first.

This is the second time this season a major New England attraction has had a full schedule published somewhere other than the page about it — Spooky World's twenty-three nights were inside its ticket widget. The lesson generalises: an event page saying nothing is not the same as an event with nothing scheduled. Check the hours page, the ticket portal, and the booking widget before believing a venue is silent.

One loose end we are not going to pretend to resolve: the park's events feed also returns four November Fridays on evening hours that the published calendar does not show. They carry no event name. Most likely a holiday event being staged rather than Screeemfest, and not something to plan around on the strength of an API row.

85 N. Policy Street, Salem, New Hampshire 03079. 603-893-3506.

The park model

At a standalone haunt, everyone in your group does the same thing at the same intensity. At Canobie, the rides run, the live shows run, the roving performers work the midway, and the family areas stay open — so a group can split.

For a mixed-age party, that is the whole argument. The fourteen-year-old does the six haunts, the eight-year-old does the rides and the midway, and nobody spends the evening negotiating.

The rule that catches people out

No costumes or makeup are permitted. The park says so plainly — leave the scaring to their performers.

Every year this surprises families, particularly ones arriving from a costume-encouraged event like Ghosts on the Banke in Portsmouth, where costumes are actively invited. Different venue, opposite rule.

The Salem confusion

This is Salem, New Hampshire — not Salem, Massachusetts.

They are two different towns in two different states about forty minutes apart, and mixing them up is one of the most common planning errors in New England Halloween travel. Salem NH also has America's Stonehenge, which is open daily year-round. Salem MA has the witch trials, the ghost tours and the October crush.

If someone tells you they are going to "Salem for Halloween," it is worth asking which one.

What to do

Book the night, not the season. The dates are settled; the price is not, and Canobie sells date-specific tickets. Check what a given Friday costs before committing to it.

Check the night before you buy. Canobie sells date-specific tickets and does not price them publicly, so the only way to know what a given Friday costs is to open the portal for that date.

If you want a New Hampshire haunt sooner, Spooky World has been running since September 18 and Fright Kingdom since September 25. Ghosts on the Banke has October 16-17 and 23-24 for the family end.

Our New Hampshire roundup tracks all of it as venues announce.

The Haunted Almanac

We check all 50 New England haunted attractions against their own websites, every week. 26 have published 2026 dates so far. Last sweep: October 8.

The ones that matter never announce. Spooky World published twenty-three nights and put them nowhere but its ticket widget; Scary Acres rebuilt its whole site in nine days without a word. We find those and send them to you. Free, and one click gets you out.

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