Halloween fun for the whole family

With Halloween just days away, many families are looking for last minute activities to get into the spooky spirit. Luckily, there are a number of scary and family-friendly opportunities in southwest Iowa.

Backstreet Ali Escape - Creston

This is the first year the Paisley Rose Boutique will be hosting a haunted house experience called Backstreet Ali Escape. Boutique owner Alison Travis said she’s always been a big fan of Halloween.

“I’m a big Halloween person,” Travis said. “My birthday is actually the day before Halloween, so there’s always been a huge celebration and I’ve always enjoyed it.”

Travis explained this idea came after planning a themed hat bar. A hat bar is where customers can chose and decorate a wide-brimmed hat to their liking.

“We decided to do it in the basement because it’s kind of just more spooky for Halloween, but with that going on, we thought we might as well just make it a haunted house down there,” Travis said. “The idea of the hat bar was going to be a graveyard, so we decided to go ahead and start the haunted house. Long story short, now we can’t actually have the hat bar in the basement because the haunted house is going on.”

Now, alongside the haunted house, patrons will be able to attend the hat bar and paint pumpkins as well.

“If parents want to bring their kids and the kids don’t want to do the haunted house, the kids can come and paint pumpkins and do all that kind of fun stuff,” Travis said.

While the haunted house itself is open to all ages, Travis recommends attendees be ages 12 and up.

“We’ve kind of been thinking 12 and up, but it’s really just up to the families. If there is anyone who does come under the age of 14, we just ask that they are accompanied by an adult to go through it,” Travis said. “It’s more just eerie. It’s not a horror film, it’s just kind of creepy and spooky.”

The haunted house will include strobe lights, tight corners and crawling.

Twisted Stalk Corn Maze and Pumpkin Patch - Lenox

Since 2015, Lincoln Calvin at the Twisted Stalk in Lenox has been providing fall entertainment for the young and old of southwest Iowa.

Calvin explained he deals in agritourism, defined by the USDA as “a form of commercial enterprise that links agricultural production and/or processing with tourism to attract visitors onto a farm, etc, for the purposes of entertaining or educating the visitors while generating income for the farm, etc.”

“We have a pumpkin patch and corn maze and an array of games and activities for kids to do,” Calvin said. “It gets bigger every year.”

Some of the other activities include a petting zoo, corn pit, bounce house and a zipline.

Calvin first thought of Twisted Stalk in 2014 when he noticed local families driving up to 100 miles away to the nearest pumpkin patch.

“I’d bought some ground and had a building that wasn’t being used,” Calvin said. “I’m thinking, why don’t we have [a pumpkin patch] here? I started Labor Day weekend of 2015 decorating and putting games together. I had no clue what I was doing. It’s grown from there.”

Calvin said that he finds it very important to keep the pumpkin patch economical for those that attend.

“Our admission prices, they’re $8 per person, 2 and under is free,” Calvin said. “What I try to do is keep the pumpkin patch as economical as possible, for all families to come. I don’t charge for anything once you enter the gate other than if you want to buy food or drinks or pumpkins. That’s the only thing I charge for after you get in the gate. If you want to play in the corn pit or the bounce houses or the zipline, the petting zoo, all that is free.”

Though Calvin said he doesn’t make huge amounts of money from this endeavor, he’s really doing it for the kids.

“I enjoy doing it, building the games and making stuff, just to have kids laugh and have a good time. We always say we’re creating memories of a lifetime,” Calvin said. “At the end of the day, when you see the smile on the kids’ face, that’s what keep me doing it every year. It is an enormous amount of work, but that’s the highlight of it.”

Nightmare on Madison Street - Mount Ayr

The Ringgold Outdoor Alliance has been providing Halloween scares to the Mount Ayr community since 2008. While originally running hay rides, they now run a two-story, 13-room haunted house at the Mount Ayr square.

“There’s several of us that absolutely love Halloween and we just thought that would be a cool thing for the kids in town,” alliance founding member Gina Still said. “We started first with the couple of hay rides, and we just had so many people and then we threw it around about building the haunted house, and it’s just gotten bigger and bigger every year.”

The current iteration of the haunted house is held in the Timby building above Still and her husband Doug’s restaurant Still Smokin’ BBQ. While the house is open Friday and Saturday the last two weekends of October, decorating starts in September.

“There’s about eight of us that do the building and the decorating. We start in September and I think we’ve calculated we’ve done about a month and a half and I think we put in over 85 hours,” Still said.

Admission to Nightmare on Madison Street, open 7 to 11 p.m., is $10 per person, with all money going to the Ringgold Outdoor Alliance.

“All the money that we raise from the haunted house or anything for Outdoor Alliance stays in Ringgold County,” Still said. “We have free fishing days for the kids and family fun nights. If somebody in another town needs something like playground equipment or something like that, we try to help out. We built a community center here in Mount Ayr that anybody can use.”

Still said people of all ages have gone through the house. There are 36 volunteers from around the area working to scare the adrenaline-junkies that come through the house.

With over 1,100 attendees last year, Nightmare on Madison Street seems to be a hit. Heated canopies are availble for those in line this year, which will likely be helpful with Still’s new goal.

“Our goal this year is to get at least 1,500 people through,” Still said. “The last two years we’ve hit 1,100. We would like to try to hit a bigger goal this year.”