It’s been four long years of waiting but the dead were finally let loose at the Queen Mary this weekend and the evil spirits rose to the occasion as they took over the ship and the surrounding grounds for the return of the Dark Harbor.
“I think this is so great, we’ve been waiting for this to come back for a while. And I go to a lot of different Halloween events and I rarely get scared there, but if you want to get scared, if you want to scream, you have to come here,” said Stacey Frederick, a Burbank resident and longtime Dark Harbor fan as she stood in the middle of the macabre carnival during the opening night of the Halloween haunt on Friday, Sept. 20.
The event, which is expected to attract more than 100,000 people to the Long Beach venue during its more than monthlong run through Nov. 2, had been shuttered since 2020 when it was closed as a result of the pandemic.
Various issues, including renovations on the ship and financial woes, caused it to remain closed until now, when hundreds of horror fans attended opening night to check out five mazes inspired by real stories about the ship, which has long been rumored to be haunted.
The mazes included three genuinely scary haunts on board the Queen Mary plus two other ones off the ship. Besides the mazes, the opening night crowd hung out at a lively carnival filled with performers such as fire dancers and a DJ spinning tunes from a dance stage.
There were carnival rides and dozens of monsters, ghosts and killer clowns walking around jump-scaring and even chasing screaming people around the grounds. Fans also searched for hidden speakeasy lounges inside some of the haunts and hung out in an area made to look like New Orleans bayou land where people could chill out and even make smores over fires.
For longtime fans like Frederick, finally being back at Dark Harbor was, well, like Halloween heaven on Earth.
“When we saw on Instagram that this was coming back we were so stoked. We signed up for the newsletter…
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