Harvesting Fears at Fright Farm!
Have you ever driven through miles and miles of rural farmland and thought to yourself that “this would make a great setting for a horror movie”? Well, you’re not alone! Approximately thirty-five years ago, Mike Rich had the same thought and decided to turn the abandoned farmhouse on his property in Smithfield, PA into a haunted house experience for the local community. It would take some time for ‘Fright Farm’ to grow from that small, single-family farmhouse into the sprawling property and linear haunt experience that it is today - but the result would be well worth the wait. The Fright Farm that we know and love today encompasses everything from chilling carnival games, pyrotechnics and live music on the midway to an incredible hayride experience to a full-on, 30-minute haunted house experience featuring multiple themes and dozens of immersive elements.
Above: Fright Farm is part of the Rich Farms property, which still operates as a functional farm and wedding venue to this very day! Thanks to PJ and Amber Marinelli for this stunning aerial shot!
When the Fright Farm staff first reached out to us about visiting the property for a tour of the haunted farmhouse, we genuinely had no idea what to expect. Smithfield, Pennsylvania was just far enough from our home in Baltimore, MD that we had not heard much about this seasonal endeavor at Rich Farms. The deeper we dug into media releases and social posts, the more we saw how beloved this haunt was throughout the nearby towns and cities. As we pulled onto the property and were directed down a dusty road to the actual haunted house itself, we could see exactly why the community had embraced this experience so enthusiastically.
As with many haunts, Fright Farm offers a series of vignettes from which visitors might select a favorite scene or immersive memory - but unlike most haunts in the modern industry, Fright Farm doesn’t boast ‘attractions’. Each scene offers a new chapter in an ongoing story that is designed to be experienced in a linear order. For that reason, would-be haunters will be escorted from the Fest-Evil Midway to the Hayride of No Return in order of their numbered tickets, braving the terror of the trail on a moving cart before being ushered onto the Grounds outside of Frightmare Mansion - each layer deepening the immersion until inevitably you find yourself exclaiming “It’s still going!?” - before you finally make your way out of the Sewers and back into the crisp night air, before being herded into the all-new Slaughter Hollow for the grand finale. If you felt inclined to stick around after all was said and done, you were welcomed back to the Midway where you could play thrilling carnival and escape games, eat monstrously sized slices of pizza and watch live bands perform while you waited for your friends to catch their breath.
Above: The old farmhouse that serves as the foundation for the haunt’s ‘Frightmare Mansion’ looks absolutely brilliant after dark! Thanks to PJ and Amber Marinelli for this incredible sundown shot!
The haunt would be exciting enough if the experience remained consistent each and every year, but the Fright Farm staff are far too imaginative and ambitious to settle. And so, each and every year, the entire haunted house experience is overhauled with a new theme. 2023’s experience, for example, was branded ‘Infested’ - this meant that every element of the haunt from your first steps off of the tractor carriage to your hasty exit through the sewers was tied together by an overarching theme of Infestation. Insects, mold, luminescent tubing and gas masks were peppered throughout Frightmare Mansion to help sell the story that the house itself had become ‘infested’, while living weeds had ‘infested’ the graveyard of the Grounds. Miles below the Frightmare farmhouse, the sewers had become ‘infested’ with - yep, you guessed it - giant rats!
On top of all of that, we learned that the staffers maintained an annual tradition of updating the ‘Big Room’. The Big Room is one of the last vignettes that travelers will experience as they move through the haunt and serves as a sort of finale for the Frightmare Mansion segment. To our eyes, the room itself - aptly named - is about the size of a hotel’s grand ballroom, layered into multiple levels with a carefully-constructed wooden staircase. Each and every year, the Big Room receives a new theme and becomes a completely different experience altogether. Our visit saw us facing off with an incredible-looking Yeti animatronic in the midst of a frozen wasteland, but prior years have seen the Big Room take the shape of a theatre or a Victorian park. This kind of dedication to keeping the experience fresh and interesting for repeat customers is exactly what makes Fright Farm so unique among haunts, and so exciting for true-blue haunters!
This is to say nothing of the incredible craftsmanship of the staff, who have custom-built almost every element that you’ll see throughout your walkthrough from start to finish. This includes everything from walkways to giant puppets to lifelike animatronics and full-on, sensor-activated show scenes. Early in our daytime walkthrough we were guided through a new element for 2023, which was a full-scale gothic village complete with cobblestone street, wooden carts and boarded shop windows. Our guide, informed us that the village had been constructed from the ground up over the course of four short months - and that he’d actually laid some of the bricks himself. To think that in the time it would no doubt take us to set up a neat seasonal display on our balcony, these masters of horror had built an entire village and populated it with terrifying villagers who were eager to scare. These artisans even bottle (and in some cases, “candle”) their own patented haunted house scents!
When all was said and done, we had nothing but great things to say about our experience at Fright Farm. We were on property from noon until almost 1am and we never stopped moving, nor were we ever once bored. The experience is thrilling, immersive, captivating and terrifying - and the actors are some of the best in the game. We cannot thank PJ and Amber Marinelli for inviting us out to visit the property and see what the haunt had to offer for ourselves, and we cannot WAIT to revisit Fright Farm again to see what new and exciting theme the experience takes on next. In the meantime, you can see our complete experience along with some scare actor interviews in our comprehensive ‘Behind the Screams’ vlog below!
