I have gone to canobie lake park since I was a kid, so over 15 years at this point. I have never done before Screamfest and my friend didn’t warn me you can only buy tickets online. So I arrived and noticed the ticket booths were closed and asked is there anyway to buy tickets in person and they said it’s online only. I do put 50% of the responsibility on my friend for not telling me this. But then 50% responsibility is on Canobie for two reasons. The first reason being this is a location with plenty of booth stations and you could easily have one open to address those who don’t buy online. The BIGGER reason though is this. THEY HAVE NO CELL SERVICE OR PUBLIC WIFI THERE. It is pretty crummy trying to break through the cell service to contact friends and to see if anyone has strong enough cell service to buy a ticket for me. If you are going to have mandatory online passes and you are very aware of your lack of cell service. You should invest in a couple of quality WiFi routers at the front gate so people can hop on it and purchase tickets OR if you don’t want to open a booth, invest in a digital station where you can go to a machine and purchase one.

Now for the second part of this experience I’ll be getting more into the screamfest experience. This experience comes with the caveat that I know staffing can be short some night and all that understandable stuff. I get that. However, nothing really felt that spooky. The walkers around the park had lack luster energy as well as in the haunts. The only one I felt had more energized haunters were the works in the location near Untamed. The other two felt pathetic. And not due to lack of ambience or visuals. The ambience and visuals were great. But the haunt near the tea party ride and near the mine ride were a bummer when it came to being actually scared. Because you can have the coolest visuals you want but when there are a lack of people or the people minimally engage it just ruins the experience. For instance when we went through the haunt by the tea party, I think we managed to walk through 6+ rooms before running into another worker. Then, the workers just hide in corners and barely move. Or just stare at you by a wall. Where is the getting up in your face? Where is the following a person for short periods of time? Making repetitive noises through yelling or banging objects? Again, some workers did do that, but for the 2 I was disappointed in, they really didn’t do a lot.

For the last part of the experience I will talk about the express pass. So, first of all you pay $50 to get in. Then, because we dealt with 40mins of trying to get me into to the place we were running short on time and they close at 11p, AND they obviously have long lines. Now we are thinking we will do the express pass. They have signs for it around the park but the signs don’t actually lead you to the direction of getting them because we tried 2 spots in the park and the people said no. Then we went to the front to guest services and they said go to the gift shop next store. We thought we would pay $25 cause it said that online. No, if you buy it at the shop it’s $30 and online it’s $25 if you match it with your ticket and add it on. Well, obviously with no cell service we couldn’t do that so we had to pay the $30. It was worth it in the sense that you get to the front quick. But again with my review of the actual haunts themselves, it doesn’t feel worth it to spend $80 for the lack luster experience.

All of this to say, I love Canobie lake park as an amusement park and for anyone trying to go there for rides whether it’s spooky season or not, it is a great time. Clean park, clean bathrooms. A lot of food options. I hope they put up more roller coasters cause one can only handle so many spinny ride options, which there are a lot there. And they took down the cork screw which was a roller coaster. But yah as an amusement park, I still love it as an adult. As a spooky place, definitely bummed.