With a reliable babysitting routine in place for our toddler now, we're back to a bit of Halloween exploration this year! Nightmare at Gravity Hill in Jackson was our first new haunt visit in 3 years, and it was a very good one. The attraction featured two optional parts - a standard outdoor haunted walkthrough, and a ride during which you could shoot paintballs at zombies (without receiving return fire, thankfully). We started with the walk and figured we'd come back for the paintball if we had time (which we did not, due to a rather slow moving line into the haunted walk). The walk was $20 and lasted almost 30 minutes, which is very good value for these things. The walkthrough was really well layed-out and organized, with a lot of different sections connected by narrow, dark outdoor passages. There was a graveyard, an Egyptian pyramid, a blacklit 3-D clown-filled funhouse, an asylum, and many more. Decorations and props were plentiful, creative, and cool-looking throughout. Some favorites were an enormous animatronic grim reaper and some extremely detailed murals of clowns with faces full of boils and growths. The actors were also well-placed, well-trained, and provided some great performances of shrieks and surprises. In particular, I recall a fantastically made-up mummy in the pyramid, and a young girl just staring creepily at us from the corner of a dark room with flickering lights. Really, some of the best and most committed haunters I've ever seen all the way through! Altogether, it was well worth 20 bucks and was a pretty fantastically designed attraction. The only complaint was that the line didn't seem long, but moved so slowly that we ended up in it for over an hour. They were letting in very small groups with fairly ample spacing between, which led to the long wait time. Once you were in, however, the spacing and pacing gave you a less-crowded and better experience inside the haunt, so it was probably worth it in the end. It did prevent us from getting to do the paintball part, though. So if you'd like to do both, get there early!
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