The spooky season is in full swing and there are so many fun ways to celebrate, from carving pumpkins to trick-or-treating to facing your fears at haunted houses. With all the options out there, how do you find the top destinations for all things Halloween-related? The 10Best Readers' Choice Awards are here to help.
- USAToday 10Best asked experts to nominate their favorite places to go and things to do in seven categories.
- Readers then vote on their top picks and that’s how the winners are chosen.
These are the best things to see and do in October for Halloween fun:
- Best Escape Room - Enchambered in Sacramento, California. They operate four different escape rooms, including Containment Breach, where players try to solve the mystery of a locked lab where an experiment went terribly wrong, and Trouble in the Toy Shop, a less intense escape room where Patches the toy bear needs help making and delivering toys.
- Best Ghost Tour - Mysteries of Hawaii in Oahu, Hawaii. It offers four different walking tours, including a Ghosts of Old Honolulu Tour and the Waikiki Night Marchers.
- Best Haunted Destination - Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. The collectibles inside reportedly come from haunted destinations across the country and they’re displayed in a 1938 property that’s believed to be haunted.
- Best Haunted Hotel - Fainting Goat Island Inn in Nichols, New York. At this former railroad hotel built in the late 1800s, guests have reported eerie encounters, like hearing footsteps on a staircase that doesn’t exist and being woken in the night by spooky voices.
- Best Haunted House / Attraction - Cutting Edge Haunted House in Fort Worth, Texas. Located in a 100-year-old abandoned meatpacking plant, it offers visitors a 55-minute haunted experience with live actors, special effects and frights around every twisting corridor.
- Best Pumpkin Patch - Treworgy Family Orchards in Levant, Maine. Put your comfy walking shoes on before you check out the eight-miles of rows of pumpkins, or take a hayride or a horse-drawn farm tour.
- Best Theme Park Halloween Event - Howl-O-Scream at SeaWorld. Visitors to the annual event can enjoy a collection of elaborate haunted houses, darkened thrill rides, immersive scare zones, as well as “darkly entertaining” live shows.
Source: USA Today