Inside Oregon’s Largest Haunted Attraction

In 2020, the haunted attraction at Oaks Park looked very different from your typical corn maze or ghoulish Victorian. At the “ScareGrounds,” Portlanders drove into car wash–esque structures where mutated aliens wriggled tentacles and masked doctors spurted fake blood against sedan windows.

Each drive-thru had its own theme: Some clearly pulled inspiration from The Hills Have Eyes, others from Commedia Dell’arte. ClearChannel had set up a haunted house at the amusement park in years past, but the ScareGrounds were unlike anything found at Oaks Park in its 120 years of operation.

Five years later, Oaks Park’s Halloween diversion has expanded far beyond a few drive-thrus. Each year, ScareGrounds owner Alex Fulmor and his team transform a 60,000-square-foot swath of the amusement park into a haunted fairground, with multiple walk-through attractions, an escape room, carnival games, and wandering maniacal clowns and chainsaw-wielding creeps. You can get “buried alive,” locking yourself in a coffin as it “travels around town.”

As opposed to the usual haunted house in an existing structure, the people behind ScareGrounds build three separate spaces on-site. At the Silver Scream, a “haunted movie theater,” visitors wander through and encounter the Big Bads from several iconic horror franchises, like Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th), Michael Myers (Halloween), and Art the Clown (Terrifier). Other experiences are more fantasy themed, or involve monster hunting. All have serious backstories, a product of Fulmor and his collaborators’ background in theater tech.

During its first year, ScareGrounds was more like a traditional theater experience with the addition of some windowside jeering by actors. “Everything was scripted; it was more like you were experiencing a story,” Fulmor says. “Going back to the walk-through model, we tried to keep the narrative theme going. You’re going through the different spaces, but actors are more loosey-goosey.”

Tickets for this year’s ScareGrounds start at $23 for general admission; prices climb up to $125 for an all-access pass.