The Tech Behind: Here’s how Kennywood park goes from idyllic to spooky during Phantom Fall Fest

Whether through a high school Physics Day, a company picnic or a birthday party, the West Mifflin amusement park is where many childhoods are made. But since 2002, every August while park goers are trying to enjoy the final throes of summer before the school year begins, the powers that be are thinking of ways to make visitors scream in ways not entirely related to roller coasters: Phantom Fall Fest.

During what’s typically known as Fright Night to locals, from September until the end of October when the sun goes down, visitors can see a different Kennywood than the one they’re used to — one filled with skeletons and the occasional ghoul lurking in the shadows.

But how does Kennywood get so frightful?

During a visit to the park before the visitors showed up for a good scare, Kennywood Operations Manager Marie Ruby told Technical.ly that almost every haunt — that is, haunted house — the park offers is different. Still, it takes a lot of teamwork and behind-the-scenes coordination to make it visitor-ready.

“We have carpenters, we have electricians, we have operations people on our artistic team,” Ruby said. “So it takes all these people and everybody has to come together.”

The park’s eight haunted houses range from high-tech to low-tech, Ruby said. If you went to the “Dark Shadows” attraction, you’d enter a building with no lights at all. If you walked into the “Malice in Wonderland” haunt, you’d find a series of mazes with actors lurking in the shadows. Mazes tend to feature more actors, from chainsaw-wielding clowns to spooky scarecrows. But in addition to jump scares, the actors hired for the season are sometimes tasked with operating the trick lights within the haunts.

“There are windows that actors can get behind with their foot pedals so when they hit the foot pedal, the light will come on,” Kennywood electrician Joel Brennan said. “So when you see them appear, we have some that are on flicker controllers, because we want it to look like it’s sort of a fluorescent, like shimmering or flickering. But it does depend on the maze and the specific scene.”

In place of actors, sometimes trick lights are activated by sensors that respond to motion. Brennan added that a lot of effort goes into not only operating the individual haunts, but also making sure Kennywood during the Fall Phantom Fest is different from the Kennywood of the summers many visitors are used to. To that end, Brennan and Ruby say that during the transition from summer to fall, nearly every light bulb is changed to reflect a darker time of year. The park also uses roughly 40 fog machines inside and outside of the haunts.

“When you come here in the summer, we have bright lights lit up,” Ruby said. “But, when you come here this time of the year, it’s darker lights, reds and purples and oranges and things like that. That includes the ride lights.”

It’s not only the lights that change: Some rides are paused for maintenance or repurposed entirely for the festivities. Since no water rides are offered during the fall, the Raging Rapids ride is drained and boats are taken out so people can walk through the area.

During the fall, Kennywood doesn’t only look different, but it sounds different as well, according to Brennan. When the park is operating during the summer, you might hear music from the radio or the variety you’d expect at a circus. For Fright Night, depending on where in the park you are, there’s a specialized soundtrack to fit the mood. If you took a ride on the park’s 100-year-old merry-go-round, the classic organ music of the summer would be replaced with pre-recorded organ music that has been modified and “warped” so it sounds haunted.

The goal, Brennan said, is to make the experience as immersive as possible.

“We have an overall park soundtrack that plays over the entire park, and then each maze and scare zone has its own different soundtrack,” Brennan said. “We have a clown area that has what we’ll use circus music, but then we have ‘Hillbilly Hollow’ that’s sort of a redneck-themed haunt up in ‘Lost Kennywood’ where we have banjo music and some old western music that’s slowed down.”

With 30 rides open, haunts and restaurants in between, it takes a large staff to keep Kennywood open in the fall. There are over 110 ride operators on any given day (or in this case, night) at the park and a total of 1,000 staff members in the park. According to Ruby, food service has the largest amount of employees, with maintenance, janitorial and everyone in between also staffing the park. The last layer, she said, is the 300 actors hired to be spread throughout the park providing a healthy dose of fear.

All and all, Ruby said when putting together Phantom Fall Fest, the powers that be always try to find ways to appeal to their visitors’ fears. Whether it’s darkness or clowns, the Phantom Fall Festival tries to have something for everyone.

“Every single guest is afraid of something different,” Ruby said. “So that’s why we have different immersion experiences for them.”

Atiya Irvin-Mitchell is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Heinz Endowments.