Leech Woods — Local services in Damascus

Oct 11th 2025 weekend is when I went. And I hate to say it but I was less than pleased with my experience this year. It's really unfortunate for me to want to give this review because I went last year (2024) and had a lovely experience. Leech woods isn't the most extravagant haunted trail, nor do they try to be. Its smaller, more personal, and you can tell they try and put a lot of love and care into what they do. But it just fell flat this year.

To me it looked like everything had been left up since last year. For example there was a bar in the main attraction line to have a drink while you wait, there were faded and destroyed paper menus from last year still taped to the bar with no one even tending the bar this time around. Almost like no one had gone through and cleaned anything up to prepare for this year.

Music choice. Not great. A guy and a girl singing country/ indie renditions of anything from Taylor swift to evanescence to Michael Jackson. And then they left halfway through my being there at around 1030? 11? And once they were gone, someone had started playing the macarena, cha cha slide, and anything in the same realm which just absolutely sucked. That is not a halloween vibe in my opinion. It just was not fitting at all.

The food, terrible. Coming from last year when they had one of the best local food businesses ive ever had vending for them, to this year with two teenagers making 2 inch sliders and disgusting nachos? No. Just not. More effort should have gone into this part of the experience. One of the main reasons I came back was in hopes of that vendor, if not someone equally as good, being there and sitting by the fire and enjoying a meal outside.

The line was probably the most frustrating part. I stood there with my girlfriend and our friend for an hour and a half in the "regular" line. And i say regular because there was a VIP line. Yes VIP at a haunted trail. Which they would let any where between 2-4 more groups in at a time which meant the regular line had to wait. And when i say wait i mean WAIT. Becayse when the "party" music(ie. Macarena, cha cha slide, etc) started playing i couldn't stand it anymore and went to sit in the car. My girlfriend sat in line with our friend for at least another hour before walking through the trail for maybe 25min.

It's not all negatives because leechwoods is relatively affordable and I believe the people working here really enjoy themselves and the job that they're given. A lot of the actors are very good and very friendly when you talk to them. The performers and vendor staff are all very likeable and you can tell they all do it because they love it which I really respect. And from what I remember on the trail last year (i sat in the car this year) it was very well thought out and very enjoyable.

Unfortunately I just cannot give a good review and would rather leave a critical one because I feel they could do better.

It sucks going out to do something like this and feeling like it was a waste of both time and money. So good luck leechwoods, hopefully you find success and evolve and grow bigger and better...

This was such a nice experience! The folks working there are super kind and friendly, when we arrived we were super impressed by the atmosphere and decorations but were not sure where the trail was, so we asked an employee who escorted us over to the trail while not breaking character which was very fun and also characteristic of how helpful and attentive the workers are. We were also greeted walking in by a woman who I believe is one of the owners of the place, she was around the whole night in costume and makeup making sure people were having a good time at the event which was just really nice to see and made the whole thing feel very personal. There are lots of things to do at Leechwoods after or even before participating in the trail despite the place not being very big which is very impressive, they utilize the space very well. Concessions are not only delicious and freshly made but very affordable, as are all the additional attractions. With that plus the tickets also being very affordable this place is a GREAT bang for your buck and felt really worth the thirty minute drive from Olney to Damascus for us. The makeup and special effects are great and the trail stations are very high quality and creative! We had so much fun on the trail interacting with the actors, and they also made sure to point us in the right direction if we couldn’t find the way, which admittedly happened a lot. Not sure if that’s really the fault of the trail being so dark or us being bad with navigation though! My one issue I think was very minor — there are a lot of air horns used on the haunted trail, which for me was very jarring, though not so scary. It mostly just made me flinch away from the noise, not jump in fear. Some of the air horns felt appropriate and fitting but there were just a lot of them and it hurt my ears after a while. Otherwise I found the trail to be super engaging, scary, and fun, with lots of creative hiding spots for the actors, great sets, awesome animatronics and props, etc. They also make all of the attractions very worth the money spent, like the carnival for example, which is about $5 a person per game and has really enjoyable and reasonably winnable games with awesome prizes. I definitely found the fact that it’s a smaller venue to be an asset, because the whole place was walkable and also not crushed with tons of people. Overall it felt like the employees really cared about making sure all patrons had the most fun and worthwhile experience possible, and like they were all having a good time working there as well which was a bonus. It’s always nice to feel like the employees are having a good time because I had a better time for it. We will definitely be coming back for upcoming...

Yea… I won’t be coming back here. I really thought this place had potential at first but that quickly changed. My group opted to do the bundle, hayride and trail, and arrived around 7 pm thinking we would beat the crowd. On our hayride, our tractor broke down because the driver ran over a tree, we had to get out and walk up to the haunted house. We then had to wait an extremely long time to get picked up to go back bc they only had 1 tractor left and a guy using his pickup truck to transport people back.

Due to the hay ride taking forever we then had to get into a crazy long line for the trail. After waiting OVER an hour in line and not reaching the half way point, we decided to upgrade to vip and skip the line. The trail was a decent length and was pretty good. It did seem like some of the actors were over it but the majority of them were entertaining.

I was so disappointed with this experience, I loved haunted trails. Even after the tractor mishap I was hoping they would rectify things and give us a refund for that portion or even give us an upgrade to vip (it was an additional $10) for the trail or even a drink but we got nothing. Compared to Markhoff’s (I did both this year) this one was completely disorganized and low quality, even the bonfire was lackluster. If you are trying to decide between the two, don’t choose this one. If you do choose Leechwood, buy the vip upgrade from the beginning so you aren’t...