Kennywood's Phantom Fall Fest kicked off on September 12 and runs through November 1, bringing seven haunts and four scare zones to the West Mifflin amusement park alongside daytime family activities like trick-or-treating. The event, ranked USA Today's No. 9 best theme park Halloween event in 2025, blends nighttime scares with kid-friendly fall fun across the historic park's grounds.
According to The News Tribune, the festival brings back Detached, billed as Kennywood's newest toy store-themed haunt, where guests encounter a puppet master assembling a puppet from visitors' body parts. The lineup also includes Malice in Wonderland Unleashed, Dark Shadows, Kennyville Cemetery, Shady Grove and Voodoo Bayou, giving Halloween-goers a rotating slate of walk-through frights spread across the park's roughly century-old footprint.
One of the season's biggest changes involves the park's former dark ride. Ghostwood Estate: Open House now lets guests walk through the eight-room mansion on foot with flashlights instead of riding through it in trackless buggies, according to the Haunted Attraction Network. The original 2008 version of the ride featured laser target blasters mounted on the dark-ride vehicles, a setup the park has now retired in favor of the immersive walking format.
Daytime Family Fun Meets Nighttime Scares
The event's dual structure means daytime programming runs from noon to 6 p.m. before the park transitions at dusk into its haunts and scare zones aimed at older audiences, per Beaver County Radio. That format traces back to a 2021 rebrand, when the park converted its original late-night-only Phantom Fright Nights — launched in 2002 — into the current all-day Phantom Fall Fest model to draw both families and horror fans.
Four scare zones round out the after-dark offerings: Fear Fest, Dead Light District, Hellbilly Hallow and The Welcoming/Departing, per the seed report. Younger visitors, meanwhile, can take part in family-friendly daytime trick-or-treating inside Ghostwood Estate, and the park is offering specialty food and seasonal drinks at five Fall Festival tasting locations.
Tickets, Passes and Security Rules
2026 Phantom Fall Fest tickets start at $37.49, while Kennywood season passes — which include access to both Phantom Fall Fest and the park's Holiday Lights event — start at $99.99. A tasting card offering food and drink deals costs $39.99, and the park also sells a discounted tasting card option specifically for season passholders.
Security rules for this year's event are notably tighter than the park's summer policies. Guests are restricted to bags no larger than 8 inches by 5 inches by 2 inches, with exceptions only for medical and diaper bags, according to Kennywood. That's a significant reduction from the up-to-15-inch-square bags allowed during the park's regular summer season. Kennywood also enforces an all-day chaperone policy requiring all guests 17 and under to be accompanied by a supervising adult at least 21 years old with valid physical ID, and the park bans costumes and face paint for guests 13 and older, along with all face masks after 6 p.m. — rules designed to keep visitors from being mistaken for the park's scare actors. Children 12 and under may still wear costumes during daytime hours.
A National Landmark Under New Ownership
Kennywood opened on May 30, 1898, as a trolley park created by the Monongahela Street Railway Company, and it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987 — one of only two U.S. amusement parks to hold that status, alongside New York's Rye Playland, according to Wikipedia. The park operated as a family-owned business for more than a century until its 2007 sale to Palace Entertainment.
In May 2025, Herschend Family Entertainment completed its acquisition of Palace Entertainment's U.S. attractions, placing Kennywood under the same corporate umbrella as Dollywood and Silver Dollar City, as reported by CBS News. That same month, the park reopened its 220-foot Steel Curtain roller coaster after a 13-month closure during which engineers added three new support columns and additional bracing to reduce structural movement, per TribLIVE — a fix aimed at improving reliability after years of frequent downtime since the ride's 2019 debut.
Kennywood previously earned an August 2025 nomination from USA Today for its 10Best Readers' Choice theme park Halloween events list, ultimately landing at No. 9 nationally, according to CBS Pittsburgh. Hoodline previously covered Phantom's 25th season debut back in April, when the park kicked off its 2026 calendar with ride anniversaries and seasonal updates ahead of this fall's Halloween programming.
