Sinister Trails: 2022 Review
Wayne's World of Trees and Pumpkin Patch, Encinitas, CA
Happy Halloween Eve! Today, we continue our late-season pro haunt resurgence with a review of a haunted attraction that wasn't even on our radar at the beginning of this Halloween season, as evidenced by its exclusion on our SoCal Haunted Attractions Guide this year. Sinister Trails is a brand new haunt for 2022 located in the city of Encinitas, north of San Diego proper and just south of Carlsbad. This haunt is probably best classified as a haunted trail, but its winding and more enclosed open-air layout makes it feel more like an outdoor haunted maze. But whatever you want to categorize it, Sinister Trails might be the best new Southern California haunted attraction you've probably never heard of!
Welcome to Sinister Trails, a new haunt located in beachside Encinitas, California! Except not at the beach part. It’s actually inland from the I-5.
Sinister Trails is the brainchild of Kyle Rising, the lead singer of a band called Sensi Trails who has never produced or created a haunt before. Though you wouldn't expect it from the chill and easy-going vibes of his Cali-surf reggae band's music, Kyle has actually maintained a love and obsession with scary Halloween and frightful haunted houses for much of his life. Originally from North Carolina, Kyle moved to San Diego four years ago in pursuit of growing his music career. In the meantime, one of the jobs he found to help pay the bills of an emerging artist included working as a scareactor at the Haunted Hotel in downtown, before it moved to its current multi-haunt parking lot iteration in Mission Valley as Disturbance. Fast forward a few years later, Kyle found himself employed at Wayne's World (the pumpkin patch, not the movie) in Encinitas. A conversation with the owner about potentially taking some space on the property to create a haunted attraction led to a business opportunity, and a year later, a brand new domain of spooky was born!
The haunted trail is located at a pumpkin patch.
Sinister Trails, a fitting play on the similar-sounding wording of Kyle's band, takes up a parcel of space adjacent to the actual pumpkin patch area, which fronts the intersection of Manchester Ave and El Camino Real. The haunted walkthrough takes guests through a three-themed trail that starts with a tour through the home and property of one fictional Lorenzo Manchester, a 1970s cult leader who experimented with ways to stay forever young but merely created hideous monstrosities that still roam the grounds today; traces through a commune of psychotic clowns with a penchant for maniacal mayhem and murder; and ends with a traipsing through a gritty scrapyard occupied by lurking zombies looking for human flesh!
There are some hideous and horrid creatures on the trail, including murderous cult members looking to sacrifice new victims.
Also killer clowns looking to sacrifice new victims.
It's a lengthy experience, clocking in at nearly ten minutes of scares and startles that constantly keep guests on edge. Accenting this is the clever layout that Kyle (who also plays a ringmaster-like host and eccentrically deranged tour guide) and his team have crafted, which doubles back upon itself and winds in a route that interconnects scareactor passages that enables the talent to utilize multiple scare opportunities upon unsuspecting guests. Throughout the maze, recurring scares spring from a familiar group of monsters--sometimes behind guests, sometimes in front of them, and always seemingly out of nowhere! This feeling of being stalked increases the dread and keeps visitors constantly on edge, because they can never rely on the comfort of knowing a jump scare from a certain scareactor is over, just because they have passed by.
What really makes Sinister Trails impressive, though, is how it feels very much grounded in a dusty, timeworn ambiance of a junky hoarder's paradise that seems to have been in place for decades. As guests go through, it may be difficult to believe that this is a maze because the sets, debris, and structures seem like they've been sitting out in the elements for much longer than the half a year that the Sinister Trails team has been working on the attraction. That's because much of it has! A large component of the "theming" at Sinister Trails is actual junkyard elements from the Wayne's World owner that the team has sorted through, organized, and carved a path around to supplement their story.
The atmosphere of Sinister Trails looks like it’s been built around a decrepit junkyard.
A lot of elements of this maze have certainly been repurposed straight from the collection of scraps that the Wayne’s World owner kept!
To put it another way, the feel of this creative haunt lies somewhere between the rugged beauty of Fear Farm Phelan and the authentically aged and weathered look of Coffin Creek, but with a higher quality gloss and similar intense frights. The Sinister Trails team has spent months sifting through the clutter of scrap vehicles, appliances, furniture, structures, and material and reconstituting them into an organic haunted maze layout that feels authentically stark and ragged.
Over that, they have layered a more characteristic set of haunted attraction theming, including motion-triggered animatronics, creepy doll and clown figures, and intriguing street-style artwork ranging from graffiti paintings to large-scale abstract pieces. It doesn't always make literal sense--why does a room include a series of hanging hands, for example--but it's always imaginative and interesting (human hibachi is pretty fun). One particular space features a series of monitors that guests quickly realize show live security footage of themselves walking through. As monsters lunge out in surprising jump scares, they can actually witness their own terror--providing a sort of meta experience that goes well with the cult-based premise of one of the three themes. In addition, the bizarre sculptures and pieces added to the maze create a surreal environment--almost like a warped exterior art museum melted into a drug-addled fever dream.
The monitors room is one of the more intriguing and unique parts of the maze.
Not everything is as it seems at Sinister Trails.
The resulting product is something freshly creative and intimately thrilling. Each group essentially has the entire maze to themselves, as ringmaster Kyle conducts a crew of monsters around to engage with the group for a majority of the course before returning to collect new victims. Though that does result in a lower capacity, which may mean lengthier queues on busier nights, Kyle's thinking is that guests will pay for and wait for a tailor-made experience that feels like it is dedicated just to them, as opposed to settling for the haunted conga line nature of traditional large scale haunts that often result in scares being spoiled or directed at targets around groups of passers-by.
Donnie Darko? Sure, why not. This fits with the theme.
If this is just a year-one effort, we can't wait to see what Kyle and his team have in store for guests in the future, as the haunt grows from its experience and continues to expand and enhance the Sinister Trails story. The fact that Sinister Trails has already accomplished all that it has--successfully unveiling a full haunt through a multi-week run--despite being relatively isolated and unnetworked in the Southern California haunt community is quite impressive. If you haven't made it down this year and won't have time on its last two evenings, mark your calendar for next year. Because I have a feeling that Sinister Trails should be around to stay for a while!
Sinister Trails steps up to bat and knocks it out of the park in their debut year!
Sinister Trails is located at Wayne's World of Trees and Pumpkin Patch at 3615 Manchester Ave, Encinitas, CA 92024 and has been open Thursdays through Sundays from 7:00 - 10:00 pm since September 30th. It concludes this season's run tonight and tomorrow night. Admission is $20 and can be purchased in advance online or in person but with cash only. Parking is free on site at the pumpkin patch but is fairly limited and on a gravel lot. Street parking is not available.
Architect. Photographer. Disney nerd. Haunt enthusiast. Travel bugged. Concert fiend. Asian.
