Ghostwood Manor presents Pharaoh's Hall: 2022 Review
Ghostwood Manor, Pasadena, CA
Our second home haunt this past weekend took us to a site we had visited last year but never got around to posting about, because we didn't get around to publishing our haunted yard display coverage. Ghostwood Manor is a third year home haunt that started as a modest though sumptuous cemetery display in pandemic-laden 2020 and continued as a graveyard haunt with an added side scene on the front driveway showcasing various eerie and spooky animated elements of a haunted study.
Ghostwood Manor makes the transition from yard haunt to home haunt walkthrough maze this year, but it hasn’t lost the yard display part!
This year, Ghostwood Manor pivots themes and goes all Bangles by walking like an Egyptian. By that, I mean they've made the jump from a simple display to an actual walkthrough maze--one that is still meant to be child-friendly--and that theme happens to involve Ancient Egypt. While there is still a more modest yard display, the star attraction of Ghostwood Manor this year is Pharaoh's Hall, a cozy but lavish little haunted house built on the driveway where last year's haunted study was located.
Guests arriving at Ghostwood Manor might first spot one of those 12 ft tall Home Depot skeletons standing in the front yard. However, this isn't the stock yard figure. Creator Stephen Taylor has made modifications and wrapped the skeleton in a fair amount of gauze to give it the appearance of a towering rotting mummy gazing out over the street. Behind it is a more traditional Halloween display along the porch, with an assortment of jack-o-lanterns and a few gravestones providing a lovely fall scene.
The theme involves Ancient Egypt and mummies, and what’s more mummy-like than terrible curses?
The walkthrough is flanked by a pair of "stone" columns with hieroglyphics carved onto them. In reality, Stephen used a Cricut to cut out shapes and paste onto them as a positive, but in the nighttime show lighting, the shadowed effect sort of inverts the perception, turning them into a negative and looking more carved in.
Inside, a series of winding spaces takes guests past a large stone tablet and an Anubis figure, a mummy that occasionally rustles from its slumber, a poor excavator cartoonishly being devoured by scarabs, miniature pharaoh figurs holding trays of candy for guests to take, and even a ridiculously adorable Kid Mummy holding a mummy teddy bear that Stephen's wife sewed and flanked by a protective mummy cat by its side.
The final scene is the most sensational--a full sized, glimmering sarcophagus that looks convincingly realistic under the theatrical lighting employed in the maze. One final mild startle scare--an animatronic mummy who demands to know who dares invade its chamber--catches guests from the side. But the feature prop is amazing, along with the detailed and textured "stone" walls that surround all of the spaces and the emblems and carvings that enrich the Ancient Egyptian ambiance.
Actually, what is better is Kid Mummy!! So freaking cute.
Pharaoh's Hall has no live scareactor and is meant to be enjoyed by the whole family. Stephen himself has a six year-old son, and if that didn't set the target demographic, Stephen's own general inclination against creating graphic or violent looking haunts would have led Ghostwood Manor down the same all-ages production anyway. For Stephen, home haunts are about bringing the joy and transportive wonder of Halloween to the neighborhood. To that end, Pharaoh's Hall is something for the community to enjoy--a passion project that gives Stephan a tremendous amount of satisfaction when he sees how much the kids enjoy going through the mini-walkthrough and come back another evening.
Given Southern California's general lack of family-friendly Halloween attractions when compared to the wealth of scary haunts, especially on the home haunt level (at least among the attractions we cover), it's great to have a residential haunt embrace something that children and parents can enjoy together. The level of detail and commitment to the Egyptian environment in this maze is quite commendable, and mix of lighting and sound and fog and trigger effects is the right amount of appropriate--not too heavy and not too subtle. For anyone in and around the Pasadena area, Ghostwood Manor is a wonderful home haunt to stop by and check out!
Creator Stephen Taylor stands in front of his creation.
Ghostwood Manor is located at 2005 N Raymond Ave, Pasadena, CA 91103 and continues its run this Friday, October 21st through Sunday, October 23rd and the following Friday, October 28th through Monday, October 31st, from 7:00pm - 10:00pm each evening. The home haunt is free, and parking is pretty available on the street.
Architect. Photographer. Disney nerd. Haunt enthusiast. Travel bugged. Concert fiend. Asian.
