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Hayling Island Funland Fright Nights - The UK’s most under rated Halloween Event!

I don’t normally do trip reports so please excuse the lack of photos, but I feel that this event definitely deserves some recognition.

Me and my partner have done plenty of the major Halloween events at the theme parks, and at the likes of Tulleys Farm, Dr Frights and Xtreme Scream Park, but this year, in search of something different, I noticed that Funland Hayling Island were advertising a Halloween event with mazes for £15 on three evenings in October, which included unlimited rides and scare attractions for the evening.

There was barely any advertising for this event apart from one page on their website with no hint of what these mazes would be. And I’d not heard any enthusiasts talk about this event.

Hayling Island Funland, for background, is basically a permanent funfair by the beach, with mostly the type of rides you’d expect at a fair, but it also has a permanent log flume and a non-spinning wild mouse coaster.

It’s a pretty small amusement park and with a £15 fee for the Halloween event, we weren’t expecting much, but it was actually really good and the £15 was really good value for what we got.

The event runs from 5-9pm, we arrived an hour late, and although we only did one ride, the two mazes, dinner, and Destination Z, we were really happy with the experience.

The event was really busy, presumably with locals, and the rides all had big queues, so we just went on the new spinning coaster, which was about a 20-30 minute wait. We’d done most of the other rides on previous visits so didn’t mind missing out.

All rides were open, even the log flume, which has been themed to Flume of Doom, but it was too cold for us to be going on a log flume.

The first maze was Screaming Hills Asylum, which had lots of unexpected elements, some really decent quality theming, including body bags, and was actually pretty long, given the small size of the building. The queue moved really quickly and we were on in about 10 minutes. It was far scarier than expected considering we saw lots of families in the queue. The actors were very interactive and I got plenty of scares.

The second maze was one featuring clowns. This one was much shorter (although, again we only queued about 10 mins, if that), and it featured actors as well a triggered animatronics and a giant pennywise. Another pretty good maze, which again was much better than I expected.

The big highlight however, was Destination Z. The queue was really slow moving and we waited for about an hour. It’s worth noting that the queue closes early, in order to be clear for park closing time, so don’t save it till the end!

When we finally got to the front of the queue, we discovered it was a train ride. The ride system itself was basically a kid train type ride, but the theming as well as the actors made this an incredibly intense attraction. I don’t want to give too much away, but safe to say that this is one of the best scare attractions I’ve ever done. The quality of this attraction was good enough that it wouldn’t look out of place at any of the major UK Halloween events.

It was so much better than expected, and the quality of the ride really took away from the pain of the slow moving queue.

By the time we got off, it was nearly 9pm, so we made our way to the beach where they have a fireworks display, something which they really didn’t need to do. The Halloween event was, in itself, more than enough, but the fireworks were a nice addition.

Overall, an amazing event for the money we paid, a huge surprise. Popular with locals by the looks of it, but barely heard of outside of the local area. We will definitely be back and I’d encourage everyone to give this event a go next year. Not painfully busy like some of the other Halloween events, really good value for money, and plenty to fill the four hours.
 
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