Your guide to a spooky Colorado fall: haunts, escape rooms and immersive scares

From classic haunted houses to gothic immersive theatre, Danielle Riha of Immersive Denver shares where to get your frights before Halloween.

H​alloween is coming fast (on Saturday this year!), and Colorado’s spooky season goes well beyond the classic haunted house.

Danielle Riha of Immersive Denver has put together a guide to the best of the season. It starts with the Denver-area haunts, including longtime favorites like Frightmare Compound, a 40-plus-year staple with a gritty, DIY feel, and Thirteenth Floor, which packs three houses into one ticket. Haunted Field of Screams, billed as Colorado’s largest haunted attraction, sprawls across a 40-acre cornfield. Prefer something family-friendly? Reinke Brothers Haunted Mansion in Littleton leans on animatronics, illusions and dark-ride gags instead of gore.

Up for a drive? Terror in the Corn in Erie and Hellscream & Terror Complex in Colorado Springs are both worth the trip.

If you’d rather solve your way out of trouble, the list includes four horror escape rooms, from a vampire’s Denver lair to a haunted hotel with secret passages.

Then there’s the growing immersive scene. Riha points to a candlelit Victorian thriller at Morwood Manor (Oct. 15-18), a four-story horror experience in a historic Pueblo mansion called Night Terrors (Oct. 8-11 and 15-18) and HALLOWMASS, two nights of immersive music and performance by itchy-o centered on grief and remembrance (Oct. 30-31). There are also ghost tours in Golden and Denver, and a glowing trail of hand-carved pumpkins at Hudson Gardens through Nov. 1.

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