Leaders Family Farms in Napoleon is more than just an amazing place to spend a fall day with your family. It’s home to a pair of haunts that can only be described as legendary.
One of the spooks at Leaders Family Farms in Napoleon.
Photo by Katie Feher
Once separated by admission lines and location, PanDEMONium and ScreamAcres have been combined into one massive, top-notch haunt. According to Kristin Leaders, “Combining the haunts has led to much less time waiting to get into the haunts. This year people buy one ticket for both haunts and get to experience them together.”
While the combination of haunts may have been designed to speed up the admission line, it’s far surpassed its that initial purpose and has created an incredible haunted attraction.
Many of the best haunts take 15 or more minutes to navigate and quite often guests are left satisfied, horrified and ready for a break. The combination of the Leaders family haunts has created an impressively disturbing 45-minute experience.
Everything about ScreamAcres screams grade-A professional design. Organization, production value, cleanliness, easy access to facilities and gobs of things to do outside of the hardcore haunts all make for very happy visitors.
What’s most impressive about ScreamAcres is how quickly you forget where you are as soon as you enter the haunts. Many guests won’t make it 3 feet into the first part of the haunt without an elevated heart rate and a good starter scare.
Navigating ScreamAcres is awesome, plainly put. The set construction and the timing of the actors are both spot-on. The combination of indoor space and outdoor paths through titanic corn fields not only enhances a sense of disorientation and isolation, but it also provides for entirely unpredictable jump-scares and ambushes.
The transition into PanDEMONium, the second haunt, is seamless. The use of light and dark in this haunt is expert. While navigation is clear and quite simple to figure out, any false sense of security this may afford is quickly destroyed as guests realize the scare style has adapted.
Like ScreamAcres, PanDEMONium boasts indoor and outdoor territory for zombies and other dead things to roam. The use of strobe lighting and other light-motion effects throughout creates a visceral, disorienting sensation, heightening the level of each successive scare.
Those brave enough to face the attractions at Leaders Family Farms each fall need only drive a short distance to the Napoleon area. The haunts are more than adequate and those with little monsters of their own will find a full day’s worth of fun things for the kids.
Pictures of Leaders’ world-class corn maze, video of their professional pumpkin launcher “Big Jack” and much more information can be found at facebook.com/screamacres. For ticket pricing, hours and directions, visit screamacres.com.
