Evilville Railroad
Back in the late 40's this cranberry bog owner in Carver, Mass. named Ellis D. Atwood had the idea to set up a two-foot gauge railroad on his property to help service the bogs. He got a steal on some equipment that was being used on a defunct line in Maine, and created a five-mile loop. Train travel still had a lot of romance attached to it, so Atwood figured he could make a pretty penny ferrying passengers through the scenic area. Before too long he'd created an amusement part called Edaville Railroad. I remember going there as a kid, with my grandparents, back in the 1970s. Edaville fell on hard times and shut down in the early 90s. It reopened two or three times under different owners, and finally seems to have stabilized under its present ownership.
Now, as regular readers will recall, Bonnie and I are a bit down about the closure of another, more recent local amusement institution -- Spooky World, the seasonal "horror theme park" that went out of business last summer. Turns out that some of the folks associated with Spooky World teamed up with Edaville's current owners to turn the site into "Evilville." The money raised by the $10 admission fee is a fund raiser, presumably to help keep Edaville, which struggles from year to year, to stay open.
The format was quite different from either Edaville or Spooky World, but was successful for its first try. Access to the normally sedate park was restricted to only one group at a time, led through holding a rope by two hosts on either end. Actors and props were spread liberally throughout -- everything from the obligatory shambling zombies stumbling out of the fog-laden graveyard to chainsaw-wielding maniacs seemingly ready to cut you to pieces.
A haunted house is a very different environment from a haunted theme park -- in houses, you can restrict visitors' vision and motion by creating narrow hallways, turning off lights and so on. Those are environmental factors that are markedly harder to control when you're dealing with a lot of open space, but the Evilville folks did their best by liberal use of hazing and fogging systems, well-placed obstructions and barriers, and dim lighting -- well, as dim as you can manage on a night lit by an almost full moon, anyway. I'm sure they're figuring it out as they go along, and I'm hoping they do it again next year -- it'd be really cool to see Edaville, which is a short run from the house, turned in to a "horror theme park" on a yearly basis. The one major problem was that the wait to get in was very long. They were taking people in about a dozen or so at a time, so it took us almost an hour, standing outside in line in the cold -- before we actually got to walk through. Better crowd management would help.
But they make it clear on the Web site that it's a volunteer effort, so they're really cutting their teeth this year. I'm hoping they can turn it into something extra special next year.