Haydenville Haunter & Maze of Mayhem: 2022 Reviews
Moreno Valley, CA
We have two more reviews of home haunt mazes before we wrap up this Halloween season’s formal updates. Last year, the thought was to feature yard displays later, during the offseason. But that never came to fruition, so perhaps it’s an early 2023 goal.
In any case, we’re headed out to Riverside County today, to Moreno Valley, home of a couple of home haunts we’ve been visiting for a few years now. Both Haydenville Haunter and Maze of Mayhem were pandemic finds—the former being one of the few actual mazes produced in 2020 (it was open air), and they’ve been part of our Riverside area rotation ever since! Both are located a little more east of Riverside the city, out in Moreno Valley, past the 91 / 60 / I-215 freeway junction, about ten minutes away from each other, making this a logical pairing for those in the area.
Both attractions also had new experiences this year, so lets check them out!
Maze of Mayhem
This is a home haunt that's been a yard display the past couple of years and ironically not a maze at all. But 2022 was finally the year that Maze of Mayhem became a (mini) maze again! The walkthrough portion wasn’t particularly extensive. Instead, the layout incorporated the interactive “peek in” sets from last year, adding a couple new scenes, before exiting out into a spider infested outdoor section back out to the street. The aim wasn’t to create an intense and unending fright zone. Instead, the scares were limited to startles provided by a young slider roaming the front garage driveway in a skeleton costume and a creepy banshee figure lurking overhead.
The facade of this year’s Maze of Mayhem was not quite as elaborate as last year’s Gothic porch scene, but it retained familiar elements, like the giant skeletons.
In addition to the Jack and Sally Nightmare Before Christmas scene and the creepier, The Ring-like scene, this year’s Maze of Mayhem also featured an animatronic plant within a foggy chamber, clambering for presumably human food. Just like last year, a push of a button triggered animations, adding a bit of a dynamic feel. Outside, the spider tunnel was covered with cheese cloth cobwebs, and a large animatronic spider lurked on the front lawn, shaking at any passers-by.
While not excessively elaborate, the displays at Maze of Mayem were fun and vividly detailed, and the maze component was lightly scary and great for the neighborhood. This was a fun little stop before we continued on to Haydenville Haunter!
Haydenville Haunter presents Catacombs of Terror
My final stop on Halloween weekend, Haydenville Haunter is one of those home haunts that creates a new theme every single year, which is pretty damn impressive, given how hard it is just to make and repeat one theme for a residential haunter.
After taking guests through a haunted swamp in 2020 and a serial killer's murder cabin last year, this year's Haydenville Haunter went international with a trip to the infamous Paris catacombs! I was pretty psyched to visit this, given that I've been to the real Paris catacombs twice and enjoyed this macabre tourist destination very much. In the Haydenville Haunter version, I was greeted by a tour guide in a lobby chamber (a “Chuck Avery,” played by creator Darren Talmidge) and given a brief but accurate history of the origin of the Paris catacombs.
Skulls and bone were the name of the game at this year’s Haydenville Haunter. But done in a beautiful way!
History Lesson Break:
Once upon a time, Paris was filled with overcrowded cemeteries that had grown within the city center as Paris expanded over the centuries. By the 1700’s, these graveyards had taken to relocating old corpses and stacking remains into roofs and walls of "charnier" galleries to condense used burial space and free up new property for the newly dead. Unfortunately, these conditions were not the most structurally sound, and when a wall adjoining the property at the city’s most populous cemetery, Les Innocents, collapsed under the weight of the bodies that had been retained by it, city officials sought to evacuate all city cemeteries.
This created a problem—what to do with the corpses of literally centuries of Parisians? The solution was found in the limestone mined out caverns beneath the city itself, which constituted a network of excavated passageways that had long been abandoned. In a meticulous operation spanning decades, the bodies and bones of the city’s cemeteries were relocated below ground. Initially, these tunnels were nothing more than a bone repository, with contents haphazardly scattered. But over time, renovations were done at the ossuary to turn it into a visitable mausoleum. These included stacking bones in more organized layouts and even patterns and providing displays and sculptural elements. In time, the Paris Catacombs became a genuine—though morbid—tourist attraction, and they’ve been exciting guests ever since!
The sinister ambiance inside the Catacombs of Terror hid terrifying fiends.
Back to the Haydenville Haunter Maze…
After Chuck was finished with his spiel, rather than descending a bunch of spiral stairs like people do in real life, I was welcome into a convenient—though somewhat bumpy—elevator that took a rocky trip down below the streets of Paris to the subterranean catacomb level. I emerged into the underground burial chamber, where Chuck continued this tour, describing how bodies were laid in small shelves called loculi. Of course, I should take care not to touch anything, lest any resting souls be upset. No sooner was that warning proclaimed that supernatural manifestations promptly started happening.
Lights began to flicker. Then the torches were extinguished. In the deafening abyss, a ghostly voice whispered with terrifying intensity: GO AWAY. And suddenly, the chamber was ablaze in fog and strobes and bodies uncoiling themselves from their tombs! In the chaos, our tour guide was lost, replaced by ghoulish figures who clearly were not happy at the trespass of their domain.
As I made my way through, trying to escape the clutches of dead souls brought back to life, I encountered ghosts, bats, and even a few shambling corpses straining to keep me below ground forever. Some of the apparitions appeared right in front of me, then disappeared. Others seemed to manipulate the very air itself, triggering little bursts of chills. Ducking under a beautiful archway of eerily-lit skulls, I came upon a more elegant room capped by a tomb with a resting stone figure carved onto the cover. But before I could admire too much, a skeleton that had been chained to the walls lunged out. Whether it was trying to claim me or make a silent call for help to free it from its shackles, I did not know. But escape was paramount.
The walls were people here. Really!
Fortunately, I was able to find my way out of the buried crypts, returning to the safety of suburbia in America rather a mystical literal underworld in France. This experience was a fun and exciting haunt that used a theme I had never seen explored in a haunted attraction before, even though said theme does make a lot of sense. I appreciate the blend of fact and fiction in Darren's production, and the great mix of life characters and motion triggered effects to mix up the different startle scares. The programming and theatrical timing, mechanical components like the elevator and some of the pneumatic jump scares, and mix of video media contributed to an appealing and entertaining story. I can't wait to see what Darren has up his sleeve next year!
Haydenville Haunter is located at 23291 Park Lane Ct, Moreno Valley, CA 92553 and was open Fridays through Sundays, on the second, fourth, and last weekends of October, plus Halloween night, from 7:00 - 10:00pm.
Maze of Mayhem is located at 21605 Alcorn Dr, Moreno Valley, CA 92557 and was ran Friday through Sunday evenings plus Halloween night across the last three weekends of October, from 7:00 - 10:00pm.
The wraps up this Halloween season rewind. We have one more home haunt maze to cover after this—an after-Halloween haunter’s night trip to an attraction that’s been around for a while, but which I visited for the first time this year. And once we get there, I promise we’ll have a break from the spooky!
Architect. Photographer. Disney nerd. Haunt enthusiast. Travel bugged. Concert fiend. Asian.
