As you first enter the waiting area for the haunted forest, you can hear the screams of girls in the distant forest. Hundreds of people around you are gathered around different bonfires and socializing. Slowly the main director calls out your sections numbers and you enter into a clown maze where you get to choose between Trail 1 and Trail 2.

Waiting in line, the screams of groups ahead of you grow louder and louder and as you move closer to the front, every now and then you are approached by a clown trying to scare your group. Finally our group gets called, and we enter the forest. Right off the bat you’re jumped at by creatures left and right. While the first couple jumps are scary, it soon gets repetitive.

The interactions between you and the creatures are definitely an A+, the amount of times they tugged on my clothes, approached me face to face, to where they even put a fake knife up against someone’s neck was worth it; the experience is physically real.

Throughout the trail you are approached by different kinds of creatures including clowns, zombies, mutated pigs, big burly guys carrying chainsaws trying to chase you, to little girls dressed in their Sunday church clothes with their faces scarred. There’s also a different variety of attractions including the haunted house, an alien space ship, a spinning room, a broken bridge, a factory. All these attractions have the variety of monster, and the different scares to haunt you.

The overall scare experience is definitely worth it, even though it is almost an hour away from McLean Virginia and now 30 dollars, going with a group of friends can make it worthwhile. If you’re into scary movies and not too jumpy at pop ups, then there won’t be much that would make you scared, regardless if you and a group of friends want to experience the best haunted attraction around then Markoff’s is definitely the place!

This article is my experience at Markoff’s Haunted Forest and is a recap of what I saw and interacted with. The environment and the attractions offered were worth the money; as well the creatures and monsters that tried to interact and scare you tried their best to make it real as possible.