Ron (spirit44)

Everyone remembers there first. While this house wasn't my first haunt, for many out there this place was theirs. If you have that brave young soul in your crew that thinks they want to give a walk through a haunt a try and make it part of their Halloween tradition, I highly recommend a drive out to Waukesha. It had a very retro feel with how it was put together for me. Even though this wasn't where I did my first, it reminded me a lot of it, complete with some festive Halloween carnival games. There were many kids standing in line, and based on the reactions as they went through, they found it absolutely terrifying. Now I wouldn't recommend this for the hard core haunt veterans, but there was a great effort put into this haunt by CMH and for beginners it hit the mark. The best part for me was that they donate the proceeds to great charities. This year the charity is Operation Finally Home. There were some very creative ideas and design elements throughout the haunt, but the one thing I would have recommended was a little more ambient lighting in some areas where characters were staged.

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It was a dark misty October night. Small pockets of fog laid heavy on the country roads. As our path meandered through corn fields we came upon our destination, a farm sat in the darkness with a beacon of light welcoming all who dared to enter, it simply read Shockwave Haunts. After parking we wandered through the grounds a bit and were drawn to a quaint little gift shop to buy our tickets. With the haunt only a short drive from the Metro Milwaukee area, it was well worth the trip. This haunt provided a great value and a setting that I just can't say enough about. You can pick one of the four houses for $10, or treat yourself to all four for only $20. The best part is to enter the houses you walk through the outbuildings of the farm and if you're lucky enough to get the right weather conditions for a perfectly spooky fall evening, it almost feels post apocalyptic.

Bloody Manor was by far my favorite of the houses. in my opinion it did the best job at portraying the horror that the setting of this farm was capable of. As you walked among the outbuildings of the farm, I was put in the mindset of great films like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "House of 1000 corpses". The walk through Bloody Manor strongly reinforced that feeling with it's gruesome rooms and surprise scares throughout. I really would have liked to see them capture the natural environment of the old farm setting more and grow that theme through the other houses.

Dick's Funeral Home was a very unique haunt experience as it was set up to be a more light hearted and comedic haunted house. I found the high level of interaction between the characters and the guests to be a great change from the ordinary and while the other houses on the lot were your typical scare the pants off of them thrill we have all come to expect, in Dick's Funeral home rather than scare your pants off, they would like to make you wet them with laughter. It was a great change of pace house in the middle of all of the terror.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, you still even get a taste of the "flavor of the day" and get a popular clown scare. It seems that even a secluded farm isn't immune from what seems to be one of the most popular creepy crawlies out there today.

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