We Checked Every Halloween Attraction in New England Against Its Own Website

We checked 50 Halloween attractions across all six New England states against their own websites. Not against each other's listings. Against the venues.

15 have published a plannable 2026 season. 25 have published any 2026 dates at all.

The live status of every venue lives on the 2026 announcement tracker, which recounts itself every time a record changes. This page is the story behind those numbers.

That isn't a story about lazy haunted houses. The season is now open — the first haunts started running in mid-September — and the count above has moved every single week since we first published this page. It's a story about the dozens of pages that will tell you, today, exactly which nights these attractions are open, and where those dates actually came from.

The full audit

What we found

15 complete seasons. Fright Kingdom in Nashua, New Hampshire: opening September 25, weekends through October 31, Sundays added from October 9, plus In the Dark in November and Fright Before Xmas in December. $41 online, $45 cash at the door — no cards. It announced first — the rest of the plannable list caught up only in the days after we started checking.

The biggest names on that list arrived last and arrived silently. Spooky World in Litchfield — the largest attraction in the region, in its 35th season — has 23 nights from September 18 to Halloween. Scary Acres in Hope, Rhode Island has 26, from September 18 to November 7. Screeemfest at Canobie Lake has 16, opening September 26. Not one of the three published a date anywhere a reader would look. Two were sitting in a ticketing system and the third was on the park's opening-hours page.

And Collins Farm in Bath, New Hampshire, whose corn maze published a July 31 to October 31 season and is open right now. Thirteen acres, three difficulty levels, all ages — plus a Flashlight Maze and a Haunted Flashlight Maze after dark in October.

Joined since we first published, and both worth planning around: Sauchuk Farm in Plympton, Massachusetts, weekends from September 19 to October 31 with tickets required, and Phantom Fall Fest at Lake Compounce — nine weekends from September 19 to November 1, and the first Connecticut attraction here with a confirmed full calendar.

The gap between 25 and 15 is the interesting part. That difference is the venues carrying a night or two rather than a season: Strawbery Banke's Ghosts on the Banke on October 16–17 and 23–24, three separate Fort Knox events in Maine, Sherman Farm's weekends, one off-season Easter night at Fright Haven in Connecticut. Real, announced, verified dates — just not enough of them to build a weekend around. Both numbers count themselves from our records, so the sentence cannot go stale the way a hand-written tally does.

4 are not running in 2026, and they are not all the same thing. Rhode Island's Haunted Labyrinth — going back to 1985 — posted a farewell letter, and Vermont's Dead North says plainly it will not be reopening: those are endings. Ghoulie Manor in Taunton says it is "closed for now". And Nightmare Vermont is taking one season off after twenty-one years, explicitly planning to come back with new concepts.

That last one is the reason this section is not headed "closed". A venue pausing to rebuild and a venue shutting the doors read identically on a roundup that only tracks whether tickets are on sale, and they are not identical to someone deciding whether to keep checking back. Every one of the four is still listed as operating somewhere else on the internet.

This paragraph used to say four, and included Factory of Terror in Fall River, whose site led with a year-round cinema while its haunted house page returned a 404. On the August 13 recheck it had published 27 nights, September 12 to November 14 — the longest season in this guide. That is the argument for rechecking rather than publishing once: the difference between "transformed into a cinema" and "open longer than anyone else in New England" was five weeks and one more look.

Two still showing 2025. Vengeance in the Valley was displaying last season when we looked. Connecticut's Legends of Fear is the subtle one: its tickets page lists "Sunday, October 12th, and 26th" — dates that are Sundays in 2025 and Mondays in 2026. The calendar check catches it in seconds.

This list keeps shrinking, and never once because a venue told us. Scary Acres came off it on September 2 — the whole Rhode Island site turned over inside nine days, rebuilt attractions and 2026 prices and a full 26-night calendar, with no announcement anywhere. Nightmare Vermont came off on August 24, for the saddest reason: its stale page was hiding the news that it is taking the season off after twenty-one years. DementedFX came off on August 21, confirmed by its own hiring page. Witch's Woods in Westford came off on August 17, and Sherman Farm with it. Five venues, five different weeks, not one announcement between them. The only thing that worked was looking again.

One open every single day. America's Stonehenge in Salem, New Hampshire is open daily, year-round, 9am to 5pm, closed only for Thanksgiving and Christmas. In a category where almost everything runs a handful of October weekends and spends the rest of the year as a stale webpage, that is worth naming.

One that had quietly renamed itself. We first recorded Lake Compounce's Halloween event as unverifiable, because the park's site rejected our requests. It turned out we were requesting a deleted page: the Haunted Graveyard is now Phantom Fall Fest, and its 2026 season — weekends, September 19 to November 1 — was published on the park's own site the whole time. A 404 from a site that also blocks bots reads exactly like a block, which is how we got it wrong for three days.

One with two different closing dates. Scary Acres in Rhode Island sells tickets for November 6 and 7, a week after everyone else has shut — and does not sell Halloween night itself. October 31 is a Saturday, it is the biggest night this category has, and it is explicitly excluded from the venue's own ticketing calendar while the 29th, 30th and November 1st are all on sale. We have no explanation and have not invented one. It is in the record as what it is: not bookable, and worth a phone call.

The five ways a Halloween date goes bad

This is the useful part, and it generalises well beyond haunted houses.

1. The schedule with no year on it

Gaines Farm in Guilford, Vermont publishes: open every Friday and Saturday, October 3–25. No year anywhere on the page.

That schedule cannot describe 2026. This year October 3 is a Saturday and the 25th is a Sunday. It fits 2025 perfectly, when the 3rd was a Friday and the 25th a Saturday.

It reads as current. It is being copied, verbatim and undated, onto roundups right now.

2. The recycled calendar nobody weekday-checked

Multiple pages list Maine's Fright at the Fort as running October 13, 19, 20, 26 and 27. In 2026 those are Mondays and Tuesdays. No haunted attraction runs Monday–Tuesday in October.

They line up exactly with weekends in 2018. That's an eight-year-old schedule that has been forwarded from page to page for the better part of a decade, and a thirty-second calendar check catches it.

Meanwhile Fright at the Fort does not appear on Fort Knox's published 2026 calendar at all. The fort's Halloween lineup is now a ghost camp, a wizarding weekend, guided tours, and a scavenger haunt.

3. The attraction that changed its name

Spooky World in Litchfield used to be Nightmare New England — older roundups still list them as two separate attractions. Barrett's second attraction in Abington has been The Cell, The Sanctuary, Condemned, Outpost 34, and for 2026 is Burial Hill Motel. Any page telling you to visit Outpost 34 is a year stale on its face.

4. The schedule that only exists inside the booking widget

This is the one we were slowest to catch, and it cost the most.

Spooky World announced its 2026 season on its homepage in the summer — a fifth haunt, a named new attraction, presale tickets — and then never published a single date. We recorded it, correctly, as "confirmed returning, no calendar," and left it there for three weeks while it was the largest unanswered question in New England.

The calendar existed the whole time. It was inside the ShowPass widget behind the "get tickets" button: twenty-three nights, each one priced, each one carrying its own weekday. A crawler reading the page sees an empty <div>. A person who clicks sees the season.

Nothing about this is deceptive. It is a marketing site and a ticketing system that were never wired together, which happens constantly, and it means "no dates published" and "no dates" are different claims. We were making the second one while only checking for the first. The fix is mechanical: when a venue says it is returning and shows you a buy button, press the buy button.

Then it happened again, differently, and that is what turns this from an anecdote into a rule. Screeemfest at Canobie Lake had said one sentence all season — "Screeemfest will reopen in the Fall of 2026! See you then!" — and still says only that. But the park's opening-hours page, which is not about Screeemfest at all, labels September 26: "Park Hours: 3pm-11pm — Screeemfest Opening Day!" The other fifteen nights follow from the same calendar, because a park that closes at 7pm in daytime season and 11pm on sixteen autumn evenings is telling you when its Halloween event runs whether or not it means to.

Two of the three largest attractions in New England published their 2026 schedules on a page other than the one named after the event. Neither was hiding anything; both simply updated the system that had to be right — the one that takes money, or the one that tells staff when to unlock the gates — and left the marketing page alone. The page named after the thing is the least reliable page about it.

5. The dead domain that outlives its listing

barrettshauntedmansion.com, friendsoffortknox.org, and fieldofscreamsri.com have no DNS records at all. The attractions behind two of them are alive and well at different addresses. Rhode Island's Field of Screams is stranger still: its former site, hauntedhayride.net, now serves the host farm's plant nursery storefront. Christmas trees where the hayride used to be.

The venue that argues with itself

Special mention to Barrett's Haunted Mansion, which is open, confirmed, and in its 35th season — and whose own website gives two different prices for the same upgrade ($65 on the tickets page, $60 on the FAQ) and two different dates for each of its special events.

Mayhem at the Mansion is "Tuesday October 20" in one place and "Tuesday, October 21st" in another. Devil's Night is October 27 in one place and the 28th in another. In 2026 the 20th and 27th are the Tuesdays. The Tuesday-matching dates are almost certainly right — but for an 18+ event with limited tickets and a signed waiver, "almost certainly" isn't a booking. Call them.

What to do with this

If you want a confirmed booking today, there are now plenty. Spooky World opens September 18 and that opening weekend is buy-one-get-one — about $26 a head, the cheapest night of its year. Scary Acres opens the same evening. Fright Kingdom opens September 25. Factory of Terror has been running since September 12. Collins Farm's corn maze is the daylight, all-ages option.

If you're planning around any other venue, check the venue's own site — and check the weekday against a calendar. That single step catches most of what's wrong out there.

If a page gives you dates without a "last checked" date, you have no way to know how old they are. That's why every page on this site carries one at the top, and why this audit is stamped July 31, 2026.

We're re-running this every week or two as venues announce. Bookmark it, or tell us when you see something change — corrections are the point.

The full state-by-state detail

New Hampshire · Massachusetts · Connecticut · Maine · Rhode Island · Vermont

The Haunted Almanac

We check all 50 New England haunted attractions against their own websites, every week. 25 have published 2026 dates so far. Last sweep: September 15.

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.

Email addressSend it