If you’re ready for some Halloween fun by the sea – and don’t mind a bit of a drive from Los Angeles, Fear Grounds at Surfer’s Point Live on the Ventura Fair Grounds should fit the bill. Open Friday-Saturday for the next three weekends, and from Tuesday, October 26th through Sunday October 31st, this lower key, three-maze haunting event is a nice alternative to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal or Knott’s Scary Farm this year.
Produced by haunt-creating pro Edward Marks, the event features the Terror Trail, The Fright Train, and The Cage. There is also a beer garden with other alcoholic beverages called The Dead End, a food stand, and copious picnic tables decorated with oversize pumpkins. Scareactors and other entertainers, such as a stilt walker or two, and spooky femme fatales twirling colorful hula hoops, traverse the area.
Once inside the main gates, The Terror Trail is the most elaborate and satisfying scare, an approximately mile-long journey past a variety of set pieces and talented scareactors as witches, evil clowns, demented killers, ghosts and the like. From bloody wrecks to covens and monsters, there’s something new popping out of the dark around every corner.
The Fright Train is a smaller attraction in which guests ride the dusty backroads of the fairgrounds in a tram, heading past a variety of scares, lit-up Halloween decor, and best of all, passing through a bevy of chain-saw wielding evil doers and into a warehouse from which suspended cocoons containing dismembered bodies hang.
The Cage leads guests through a contained series of metal fencing winding inward, as dark monsters prowl through the chain links and bars, waiting to rattle nerves and torment the unwary.
All three are completely outdoors, well distanced, and thoughtfully laid out for pandemic times.
Marks says “Growing up in California, Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays…guests [will] test their fears at this one-of-a-kind beachside journey…”
Fear Grounds at the fairgrounds is located at 10 W. Harbor Blvd. in Ventura; for tickets and more info visit https://www.surferspointlive.com/fear-grounds.
- Genie Davis, photos by Genie Davis and Jack Burke