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 right away and we’ve been on it making sure we got on the presale list. And we’re actually coming back later in the season,” she said.
And she was not disappointed after surviving all the mazes, especially the ones on the ship like “Infirmary,” an entirely brand new concept that follows a sadistic surgeon and his accomplice Graceful Gale. People who dared to enter this maze were chased by live actors portraying suffering patients and had to walk through rooms filled with bodies all while under the eye of a slowly walking Graceful Gale.
But for the Dark Harbor fan it was “Feast,” the story of a chef who was said to have gone mad and murderous onboard the ship, that scared her the most.
“They had so many cool props in there and there were just tons of different scare zones and they really really get you in those little hallways and behind the doors,” she said.
Opening night also attracted horror fans who had never previously attended Dark Harbor like Tucson, Arizona, resident Sarah Moreno, who had just gone through all the mazes on the ship.
“I love how long the mazes are, how interactive they are and how they follow you and being on the ship added so much to it, it changes the environment so much,” she said.
Other first time Dark Harbor visitors included Fresno couple Krystal Haubenchild and Angel Fernandez, who decided to go to the haunt after watching a movie about the haunted ship. As they stood on the Observation Deck bar overlooking the grounds, the couple had yet to go through any mazes because they had been too busy running from the monsters that roamed all over the carnival.
So far they had been scared and chased by ax-wielding zombies, chainsaw carrying creatures, monsters on stilts and the always popular metal knee-pad wearing sliders, who ran up to unsuspecting people and created sparks on the ground as they slid by.
“It’s so much fun because the monsters all interact with me to scare her,” Fernandez said
“I’m still sweating. It’s a lot. It’s scary just walking around they’re all trying to scare me and it’s like a show outside. It’s actually so much more fun out here, I really wasn’t expecting to have this much fun,” Haunbenchild said.
Dark Harbor
When: Select nights through Nov. 2.
Where: The Queen Mary, 1126 Queens Highway, Long Beach
Tickets: $39.99 and up
Information: darkharborhalloween.com
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