“Best One They’ve Had in the Past Few Years”: Inside the 2026 Los Angeles Haunted Hayride
By Seth Metoyer | MoreHorror.com Reporting and footage by Diana Prince
The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride returned for another season of darkness and on Friday, September 25, they opened the gates of Midnight Falls for media night and pulling guests back into that strange stretch of Halloween mythology where witches still settle old scores, the dead refuse to stay buried, and climbing onto a wagon in the middle of the night somehow feels like a perfectly reasonable recreational decision.
More Horror correspondent Diana Prince was there for the opening festivities, taking in the latest incarnation of one of Los Angeles’ longest-running seasonal horror attractions and capturing footage from inside the experience.
This year’s story once again unfolds within Midnight Falls, a town caught beneath the influence of the Witch of the Woods, whose spell has weakened the boundary between the living and the dead. Spirits from the underworld begin crossing over as her army gathers, turning the Hayride into a journey through a community slowly being swallowed by its own supernatural nightmare. The mythology gives the attraction more than a collection of disconnected monsters waiting beside the road. Midnight Falls operates more like a haunted little universe, where scarecrows, witches, restless spirits and corrupted creatures all feel like pieces of the same cursed ecosystem.
For Diana, the biggest takeaway came down to something much simpler: the Hayride itself delivered.
“The hayride was great! Best one they’ve had in the past few years,” she told More Horror following the event.
The footage from media night captures the kind of atmosphere the Haunted Hayride has built its reputation around, where darkness becomes part of the set design and the spaces beyond the wagon feel deliberately uncertain. Performers emerge from the environment, theatrical lighting cuts through the night, and the entire attraction leans into the wonderfully irrational idea that whatever lives in Midnight Falls has been waiting for visitors to come through. The experience works through scale as much as individual scares, surrounding guests with movement, sound and characters instead of relying entirely on the rhythm of walking through another dark hallway waiting for something to jump from behind plywood.
That has always been part of the particular charm of the Hayride itself. Haunted attractions usually force visitors deeper into confined spaces, shrinking the world until every doorway becomes suspicious. The Hayride opens everything up. Guests sit together in the open air while the darkness stretches outward in every direction, which creates its own strange vulnerability. You can see more of the world around you, yet that extra visibility gives the imagination more territory to populate. Somewhere beyond the lights sits Midnight Falls, and the Witch of the Woods apparently has an impressive lack of interest in municipal boundaries.
There is also something wonderfully old-fashioned about the basic idea beneath all the production design. Long before immersive horror became an industry term, people were climbing onto wagons, wandering through autumn fields and telling stories about witches, ghosts and whatever might be moving beyond the tree line. The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride takes that familiar seasonal ritual and runs electricity through it, turning the harvest imagery of Halloween into a theatrical nightmare filled with creatures, elaborate environments and performers who understand that half the fun comes from watching an audience realize exactly how trapped they are on a slowly moving wagon.
Media night offered an early look at what visitors can expect throughout the 2026 season, and Diana’s verdict suggests that Midnight Falls has found its rhythm again this year. For an attraction that returns annually, evolution becomes part of the ritual. The town comes back, the Witch keeps casting her spell, another group of unsuspecting passengers climbs aboard, and Halloween gets another chance to reinvent the same ancient fear of what might be waiting outside the firelight.
The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride runs on select nights through November 1, 2026. Tickets, dates and additional information are available through LosAngelesHauntedHayride.com.
