Apple Valley Halloween 2019 Review: High Desert Haunted House

High Desert Haunted House completes the third and final chapter of our Apple Valley 2019 Halloween Tour. Though the haunt has many actors and jump-scares, the drive to the destination is arguably the scariest part.

High Desert Haunted House is located on a hill about a quarter mile up a dirt road, shrouded in darkness. With no street lights, few if any visible houses, and little bit of sagebrush and dirt visible in the headlights, the panic of not being able to see could possibly scare the sh*t out of us! So how do we know we are on the correct path? Well, we get lucky because a welcome party of scare actors greeted us with chainsaws. They surrounded our vehicle and peeked inside, then let us go. We wonder whether it is a good sign or bad that they let us through so easily.

High Desert Haunted House 2019 Halloween Review: Scare Zone & Entrance

As we wait to get into the haunt, the scare actors that greeted us in the car approach the queue line. No wonder they let us through: now we are powerless in unfamiliar territory with nowhere to run, and we definitely can’t get to our vehicle. There is a clown with a chainsaw, a butcher with a chainsaw, and a monster with a bat.  It is pure entertainment to see adolescents shrieking and yelping helplessly.

High Desert Haunted House 2019 Halloween Review: Maze

We enter the twenty-room, prop-filled insane Asylum with monsters, clowns, mutants, zombies, ghosts and an endless assembly line of scare actors. Though we cannot not make out from the sets that it is an asylum, the bulk of the inmates do seem deranged and twisted.

The scares are very old school, which is something many fanatics seem to appreciate. This is one walk-through where we really don’t see the jump scares coming: although each room features a different theme, characters roam freely, tracking us down and popping out of nowhere after we think we have left them behind. If that weren’t enough, some of the rooms feature three or even four scare actors; while we are focused on the first three actors, the fourth takes advantage of our distraction to deliver a scare. Again, old school but still appreciated.

What impresses us most is the seemingly endless space inside this independent Halloween haunt. It seems to go on and on with hundreds of props filling each room. We enjoy the room with the clowns and the room with toxic waste toward the second half of the walk-through. The lighting from the toxic room reminds us of “Sewer of Souls” from Six Flags Magic Mountain Fright Fest.  With so many things inside this haunt, something is bound to scare you.

High Desert Haunted House 2019 Halloween Review: Conclusion

There are two themes this year. Fridays is Deadwood Ghost Town – which, according to the haunt’s Facebook page, is “a twenty-room area plus Giant Graveyard in a Western setting complete with Saloon, Church, Butcher room, taxidermy, Blacksmith, Hotel & Jail, watch out for Deputy Death and Marshall Mayhem, along with the cast of Zombies, Mutants, Half-breed Creatures that are Pigman, Goat-boy Horseman, Bird people, Scarecrows, Witches, the Hangman The Undertaker & many other cast members waiting to give you a great SCARE happening every Friday in October.”

We visited on a Saturday Night, which is their Victoria Manor Insane Asylum theme. We couldn’t quite grasp the nature of the theme from its decor. Is it a Victorian Manor-era insane asylum or an insane asylum named “Victoria Manor”? Even the description of “Deadwood Ghost Town” can be a tad confusing. We hope in the future that the themes are more clearly defined.

But in the end, we came to this conclusion: Who cares! With twenty rooms and probably an equal number of of scare actors – or more – it is hard not to be impressed with this action-packed walk-through.

High Desert Haunted House 2019 Halloween Review: Photograph Gallery