On Friday and Saturday nights from the end of September through Halloween, Tweetsie Railroad transforms itself into a “spooktactular” destination. With haunted houses, freaky forests, and a ghost train ride, Tweetsie invites older kids (ages 8 and up) to join them for a frightfully good time.
During the day, the park is open with all of its regular Wild West adventures and rides, but when the sun goes down the creepy creatures come out. Tickets for the night-time festivities are sold separately ($52 ages 13+, $35 kids 3-12, kids under 3 free). Your pre-purchased ticket allows you entry to the park starting at 7:15 pm and a ride on the Ghost Train at a designated time. Trains run from 7:30 to 10:30 on the half hour.
We arrived right when the park opened and headed in. The Ghost Train was boarding for its first ride and we watched it chug away before heading to the Boneyard. We followed the path under the arch of lights and came to the large open air tent. This area housed the Warp Tunnel, Black Hole, and Freaky Forest. We got on line for the Freaky Forest, a walk-through haunted forest.
The Freaky Forest is recommended for kids age 8 and up but if you have a kid (or adult) who doesn’t like things jumping out at them, you should skip this. We went in with 3 adults and 4 kids and I led the way, knowing that my youngest (12) was apprehensive. The first room was really cool. It had a very realistic hologram of an alligator. With a smoky mist swirling around on the ground, the alligator chomped in the air towards the people entering. For a second I couldn’t figure out where to go (it was obviously a hologram so I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to walk through it) but I finally noticed a curtain off to the left that we pushed aside and walked through. From here we went through a series of rooms (12 in total), each with different scary scenes and characters. Inevitably, in each room something jumped out at us from around a corner or one of the fake zombies/skeletons/ghouls was actually real and sprang up from its resting place to scare us.
Several people in front of us went in with their younger kids and I’m guessing they regretted that decision. The people who jumped out at you did not discriminate based on age (young or old) and we could hear several younger kids screaming and crying ahead of us. So I’d say you just have to know your kids. Even though he is 12, my youngest did not like it and skipped the ghost train because he didn’t want anything else to jump out at him.
What everyone did love was the Vortex Tunnel. This was just a really short walk-through room but it was really cool. A bridge leads you through a cylindrical shaped room and the walls spin in a circle around the bridge, giving you the sense that the bridge itself is tilting. The illusion is so strong that you feel yourself leaning and actually grab on to the handrails so that you don’t fall over. The boys loved this and ran through about 5 times in a row.
From there we headed into the main part of the park, bypassing the Haunted House because one jump scare attraction was enough for my youngest. Miner’s Mountain is closed during the evening festivities, but with the exception of the Turnpike Cruisers, all of the rides in the Country Fair section of the park are open. Festively renamed The Creepy Carnival, this section of the park had some fun Halloween decorations, and we really enjoyed the nighttime view of the park from the top of the Ferris wheel.
The kids rode all of the rides in the Creepy Carnival (some multiple times). The adults for the most part rode the Ferris wheel only, largely due to the fact that intense spinny rides and people in their mid 40s do not mix very well. While we sat there waiting for the kids on the rides, I marveled at the fact that Tweetsie opened in 1957 and hasn’t really changed since then yet somehow still looks like a weekend church carnival that is going to be packed up and driven away on trucks at the end of the day. Everything from the safety gates to the rides themselves looks temporary but I think that adds to the “blast from the past” vibe that they are going for.
As the time for our ghost train ride drew near, we started walking down the mountain. My youngest was unsure about whether or not he wanted to ride the train so I went to ask a helpful employee some questions about it. I reported back that it was werewolf themed and that there would be one jump-out-at-you part but if you sat in the window on the left-hand side, your exposure would be minimal. Ultimately he decided to sit it out and he and my husband went to ride more rides while the rest of us went on the train.
The train obviously follows the same route as the regular Wild West ride and re-uses all the sets and props along the way. The story alternates between pre-taped video shown on the screens in the train cars and live action on and off the train. I’ll be honest, the story was pretty disjointed, overly complicated and hard to follow. But basically there were werewolves in the woods and when we arrived at the first town, the conductors got off the train to fight them. A werewolf boarded the train and ran up the aisle from the back and even grabbed my shoulder as it went by. The train took off, only to stop again at the next town where more fighting ensued and victory was ultimately claimed by… Bigfoot?!? A strange cross-over but Bigfoot saved the day, or so we thought. We learned that the werewolves had really won when the conductors got back on the train and started walking up and down the aisles again… and we saw that they had been transformed into werewolves!
Except for the werewolf running down the aisle (which was fairly predictable but still surprising when it happened), I’d say that the ghost train was more tame than the Freaky Forest. My son probably would have been fine with it but I certainly wasn’t going to push him into anything he wasn’t comfortable with. If you want the best view of the action, sit on the right hand side of the train. If you want to avoid being scared by a werewolf, sit in a window seat.
If you live in North Carolina, you can invariably sing along to the Tweetsie theme song, Tweetsie you’re a blast from the past. This is true on several levels. The park itself seems frozen in time, but it was also really strange for us to come back here with our boys as teenagers after so many visits when they were pre-schoolers. My how things have changed.
Or maybe they haven’t changed so much after all? They always seem to end up in Tweetsie jail.
We had a lot of fun at the Tweetsie Ghost Train, both reliving old memories and making new ones. For young kids, I’d recommend visiting the regular park during the day. They have some great fall and Halloween decorations and you can experience all the fun of Tweetsie without the frights. If your kids are older, an evening at the Ghost Train can be a lot of fun. You can still pick and choose your activities but most are mild enough that they can be enjoyed by kids 8 and older. Just make sure you don’t get bitten by a werewolf!
