Honest Review of Walabi Halloween Fright Nights 2022

Last Updated on December 22, 2023 by Themepark Freak

Walibi Holland is an amusement park, one that used to be known as Six Flags Holland. Like any Six Flags, it’s an amusement park chalked full of roller coasters. During the month of October, the park turns into a horror show. Welcome to the 2022 honest review of the Walabi Halloween Fright Nights.

Walabi Halloween Fright Nights and Spooky Days

From park open until 17:00, the park is in Spooky Days mode. Everything is still Halloween themed with ghouls and haunts, just much less scary than during the Fright Nights.

At 18:00 the Fright Night starts and all of the more intense haunts come out to play.

Spooky Days Horror Zones

• Pirates Cove
• Tangled Twigs
• Nightmares
• Ghostly Graveyard

In the Pirates Cove, the flavor was heavily Pirates of the Caribbean themed. The Tangled Twigs was full of roaming trolls. Then in the Nightmares section, there were haunted dolls and other sleep themed horrors. And of course, the Ghostly Graveyard had vampires.

If there were little kids that might get too scared, they could pick up an “anti-monster” button.

Fright Night Scare Zones

• Nightmares
• Pirates Cove
• Tangled Twigs
• Villains

The first 3 scare zones morphed into much scarier versions. Bloody teddy bears, zombie pirates and troll people that looked like they wanted to use your bones for their structures. Not to mention that you had things that looked like bushes jumping out and trying to scare you.

The Villains scare zone was actually very cool. It reminded me of the table top RPG called Necessary Evil. In this setting, the Villains have to save the world from invading aliens. Yea, that goes about as well as you think it might. Regardless, the Villains had well thought out costumes that really embodied the atmosphere.

The Festival of Freaks

This area is where you can find a spooky carnival. The overall theme is old time freak show. I didn’t get in during the day but at night there was variety shows going on for the audience. More about this later.

My Walabi Halloween Fright Nights 2022 Review

In this review, I will first tell about my overall day and then break down the review into:

• Rides
• Entertainment
• Haunted Houses
• Scare Zones
• Food
• Parking

An Overview of the Day

Since we’d be staying until 10 or 11 at night, we arrived at the park at noon. The main parking lot was closed and I was directed to an alternative lot. While it felt like it took about 10 minutes to drive over, it was only a few minute walk to the park.

Before getting into the park, we had bag checks. It felt like it was taking forever to get through the line. Unlike at Disneyworld, people weren’t opening all of the compartments of their bag and the bag checkers were opening and checking everything. My bag took seconds since I had everything open and ready. Then I was able to go scan our tickets from my phone.

Once inside, it was clear the park was PACKED. I mean packed. So the first thing we decided to do was get some food (my nephew is 13 and in that growing boy eats everything mode).

We chose to get some burgers at Hacienda over by the roller coaster Condor. There wasn’t very many people in line before us, but since they were only taking the order, cooking the food and serving one person or group at a time, it took forever. But we got our food, ate and headed to Condor.

The line for Condor extended way out from the official entrance to the ride. We had just over an hour wait.

We then took a wander through the Pirates Cove in order to get to Lost Gravity. Since we have some pirate fans in the group, we took our time strolling through taking in the costumes, make-up and theming.

Unfortunately the wait for Lost Gravity was about 2 hours at this point and our first haunted house was at 6pm. So we headed over to the The Tomahawk (this is dutch, it’s not going to be politically correct like in the USA). There were two of us who didn’t go on it. So my friend and I grabbed a water and ham sandwich from a nearby vendor and waited for them to ride.

We then headed over to some bathrooms by the way of the Nightmares Horror zone, but it was just turning 17:00 (5pm) so the daytime actors were already heading out for the switch over.

After wandering back to the area that The Tomahawk is, we were about 15 minutes away from being able to get into the Jefferson Manor.

Once we were done with the Jefferson Manor, we went to Club Walabi for dinner. The line was out the door when we got there and slow to move. I went and got a table while my friends and nephew stood in line for the food.

After we ate, we went to The Villa and finally ended our day with Psychoshock. On the way out of the park we stopped at XPress: Platform 13 but there was still a 30 minute wait and my nephew wanted to go home.

The last queue of the evening was the parking lot. So that was our day. It only rained a few times during the day.

Rides During the Walabi Halloween Fright Nights

With wait times being between an hour to two hours long, we didn’t get to ride much of anything. To be honest, it was pretty ridiculous.

The single rider line for Condor wasn’t open and I’m not sure if it was for the other roller coasters. Even if they were, they’re really not an option at Walabi. Remind me to talk about past (totally bizarre) times in the Walabi single rider line.

Anyways, due to the price of the silver or gold Fast Lane prices (silver is just a virtual pass that cuts your time down by 50% for 55 euro while gold lets you go as many times as you like for 55) and two of my party not being able to afford it at this time, we just had to wait.

The Condor

The Condor is a hanging roller coaster that’s in a 2 by 2 configuration. There are loops, cork screws and drops. It gets up to 80km per hour. The worst part of the ride is the stop at the end. It’s a neck jerker.

Since I didn’t get to go on any other rides at this time, I can’t give anymore reviews.

Entertainment

There was 3 main sources of entertainment that wasn’t a ride, scare zone, haunted house or other Walabi Halloween Fright Nights attraction (there were some others we didn’t buy into).

The first was a silent disco. We didn’t participate but the disco area outside of Club Walabi was packed and it looked like everyone was having a really good time.

Then there was the main stage near the entrance that had a DJ. The music was louder than it really needed to be but otherwise there were plenty of people dancing whenever we went by. My nephew thought the adults were weird for singing along with 7 Nation Army.

Then there was entertainment in the Festival of Freaks area.

This was lead by Eddie the clown who was MC for all the “shows” in the area. We stuck around for a song, a dance and some magic tricks. The one thing that could be vastly improved on would be a time table of when the next show is. We stood around for what seemed a long time to see something happen.

Haunted Houses at Walabi Halloween Fright Nights

We paid for 3 haunted houses. That’s right, unlike Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights where you get to enter all of the Haunted Houses (10 of them in 2022) for the price of your ticket, at Walabi’s Fright Nights you have to pay for all the experiences outside of the scare zones.

So we went to the 3 main haunted houses. All 3 cost €7.50 each.

Jefferson Manor

The concept of the Jefferson Manor is the family Jefferson died there and now haunt the place. As with all haunted houses of this type, the house has fallen out of repair and is full of walls with holes, cob webs and skeletons in the closet.

The 6pm wait time wasn’t long and it wasn’t very crowded. We went in with just our group and right off there were some great jump scares. My group started the “Jesus!” count as that seems to be what I was screaming every time I got caught out.

While the concept wasn’t overwhelmingly original, the costumes were top notch as was the theming of the actual haunted house. Oh, and the guy flying across the ceiling was pretty neat and it caused a scare actor to get me with a jump scare while I’m standing there gawking.

The Villa

This particular haunt’s concept is “starring in a horror film.” What I thought it was going to be (being stuck in a horror flick that was being filmed) was very different than what it actually was.

Walabi’s website calls it “finding yourself in Hollywood Hell.” I found it being in horror movie heaven. Seriously, as I went through and recognized all of my favorite horror films and thrillers, I had the biggest, stupidest grin on my face. I’m pretty sure the scare actors were thinking, “wtf is up with this lady?” as I went through.

Now, while I was a kid in a candy store calling out all of the different movies as we went through, my nephew was having a little rougher time. First, at 13 he hasn’t watched ANY of these horror movies (something I’ll have to work on rectifying) and he asked to go in the front of the 5 of us. He absolutely refused to be near the front for Psychoshock!

So what was in this year’s Villa? Well, Halloween didn’t end in the Villa. Michael (who was a scare actor) was alive and well. We had the Scream ghost, the Exorcist, Psycho, Hannibal from the silence of the Lambs, Pennywise from It, and Chuckie. I “think” we also had the ghost from The Conjuring in the basement but I’m not 100% about that one. There were more, but there was so much to see and so many details to take in I didn’t catalog it all!

Very well done and something any horror movie enthusiast would love.

The only down side is the scare actors had a really hard time scaring anyone (outside of my nephew) because it was just a continuous chain of people going through. The jump scares they managed on him though were 10/10.

Psychoshock

This, for me, was probably the most lackluster of the 3 haunted houses. It was a typical “mad scientist” type trope in an asylum.

This was our last house of the night, closer to 10pm. I took up the rear for this haunted house and nothing followed me, nor did any of the scare actors manage to get me with jump scares. Honestly, it didn’t look like they got anyone from any of the party.

I will say once again the theming, set and props were great. However, it didn’t really feel like the scare actors were into it and there wasn’t anything “amazing”. Not like what I saw in the Jefferson Manor or The Villa. If they do this house again next year, I wouldn’t bother buying a ticket.

Scare Zones

Out of all the scare zones, The Wilderness was the one that got nearly all of us at some point. We had to go through it to get from one side of the park to the other, so we had to contend with the damned bush people.

There were people in ghillie suits hiding in the bushes. You’d hear a whistle from one side and while you’re looking over there, someone close to you would jump out with a rattle.

My nephew did NOT appreciate the bush people and started to point one out. I started to say that every time a twig blows in the wind there wasn’t someone there… then the bastard jumped out at me. I kind of wish they were taking our pictures, I’m sure me on one leg jumping away from the bush person was comical.

There were several points where we’d just stop and watch the scare actors in the different Scare Zones. They’d pick their next victim, stalk them, wait until the person wasn’t looking in their direction then jump at them with a rattle of some sort. Or a whistle. Or growl, hiss, bark, etc. It was hilarious.

Food During Fright Night 2022

Oh man. Lets just call this 0/10 right now.

Way back in the day I was a manager at McDonalds. I had the honor of working at an A+ scored store. The crew was motivated, happy to help customers and did their best to move the line along. This often meant taking an order, having them move to the side and then taking the next order before putting the order of the 1st person together.

To be fair, I rarely see this tactic in the Netherlands anyplace else so I really didn’t expect to see it here. However, one would hope with sold out crowds that there would be something in place to move the crowds while maintaining quality (or at least hot) food.

Walabi really could learn from Disney properties or Universal Studios with mobile ordering (order from your phone, set the time you want to pick it up, pay and then just get your food at the time). Hell, Kennedy Space Center which sees LARGE crowds has the ordering computers in the lobby of the restaurant like McDonalds or Burger King.

Personally, I don’t think that this would be a worthless investment for Walabi. Especially with the lack of staff (or lack of training). Or, pay more and get more staff to full fill this need.

The dining at Club Walabi, a canteen style restaurant, was really disappointing for the price of the food. It took about 40 minutes to move through the line. Once the food was ordered, the customer stood around waiting for it to be cooked one at a time. With a party of 5, by the time the 5th meal was cooked the first 4 was cold. The quality of the food was not worth the price either. In short, it was pretty pathetic.

I would sincerely hope that Walabi does something about this for 2023.

The Parking Situation

The wait times for the rides and the quality and care of food was nothing compared to parking. What seemed like an OK deal when we arrived ended up being almost 2 hours of sitting in the parking lot when we were trying to leave.

We left the park about 22:30 (10:30pm). We got to the car about 22:45 and then proceeded to just sit there, not moving until about 23:45. Getting out of the secondary parking, where we ended up, had no direction from park staff. So those at the front, like us, got to go absolutely nowhere.

At some point we saw people leaving on the other side of the parking area from us so I turned around and managed to get in line. There were a few instances of very rude people, but that isn’t necessarily Walabi’s problem. However, the lack of direction and movement didn’t help.

Apparently it was this bad several years ago, before the pandemic, according to one of my party members. It seems that nobody in Walabi management really was prepared or cared to fix this issue.

Overall, it was horrible.

Will I Go to Walabi Halloween Fright Nights 2023?

Good question.

This year I paid the following:

• € 38.99 x2 HFN 2022 tickets = €77.98
• €6.88 x6 Haunted Houses = €41.28
• €35.00 meal #1 = €35.00
• €17.50 meal #2 = €17.50

Total spent on 1 day where we were only able to get on 2 rides, spend 1.5+ hours in the parking lot, and ate horrible food? €171.76

If I heard that Walabi Holland was going to make serious improvements into their dining or parking, perhaps I’d give it another go. However, I think next year I’ll be trying another attraction for Halloween. Walabi isn’t the only one out there.

My advice if you read this, go try another attraction unless you’re going to bring your own food and you want to shell out for one of the Fast Passes.

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