Silverwood’s team found inspiration for Scarywood at Knott’s Scary Farm

Sun., Oct. 9, 2016

By Rob Curley robc@spokesman.com (509) 459-5030

It’s no surprise that Halloween is big business, and not just at theme parks. It’s estimated by the National Retail Federation that Americans will spend $8.4 billion (billion with a B) this year on Halloween candy, decorations and costumes. NRF surveys indicate that nearly half of the 171 million people who mark the holiday will do so in costume or in a decorated house.

Is there a house in your neighborhood that goes all out for Halloween? We want to hear from you. We’re putting together a map of local homes to check out this season. Enter the coordinates at spokesman.com/maps/halloween-haunts/.

The leaders of Silverwood knew theme parks across the country were attracting record-setting crowds at a time when the park near Coeur d’Alene was used to being a ghost town.

And the secret was literally ghosts. And vampires. And werewolves. And all of the other things that go bump in the night.

Turning family-friendly theme parks into oversized haunted houses was big business. And the Silverwood management team wanted to learn from the masters of this mayhem.

In 2008, the park’s leaders traveled to the birthplace of this concept – Knott’s Berry Farm, located in Buena Park, California, about 20 miles south of Los Angeles. More than 40 years after its initial Halloween Haunts began, the park is still considered one of the largest innovators of this spooky concept.

“Because Cedar Fair (owners of Knott’s Berry Farm and 10 other parks across the nation) didn’t have any regional competitors to us, they showed us everything,” said Mark Robitaille, director of marketing and communications at Silverwood. “We learned so many things from that visit and how we might actually do this at our park.”

Cedar Fair’s closest park to Silverwood is California’s Great America in Santa Clara, nearly 1,000 miles away. But Knott’s Berry Farm – which renames itself Knott’s Scary Farm for the Halloween season – is where theme-park operators from around the world travel to learn the scary details.

But it didn’t start out that way.

According to the Orange County Register, Knott’s Berry Farm’s first version in 1973 had nine costumed monsters roaming the park – “The Munsters” (remember them?) in the Livery Stables, the Phantom of the Opera in the Saloon and the Invisible Man in The Haunted Shack – and decorations of cobwebs and skeletons.

That’s it.

Knott’s Scary Farm has evolved into something considerably more elaborate. And considerably scarier. With more than 1,000 monsters populating the fog-drenched park, graphics and gory decorations, and numerous haunted houses and mazes filled with the latest technology, the park isn’t where you go if you’re not wanting to test the power of your bladder.

“We were very primitive,” Gary Salisbury,a longtime park entertainment manager told the Register in a story the newspaper published last year. In 1973, it only took a few days to set it all up. Now, planning and preparations for the event take all year, and it is easily the most pivotal point in the park’s financial year.

The event was an immediate success, Salisbury said.

“We opened the gates and we were just swamped,” he recalls of that first night. “We sold out Friday and Saturday night. In those days, capacity was smaller but we probably reached 15,000 a night.”

Knott’s was the first theme park to hold a special ticketed Halloween event. Now, it’s commonplace at parks across the planet, even at Disney’s theme parks.

But this wasn’t Mickey Mouse’s idea. It started at a family-owned theme park that was just as famous for its chicken-dinner restaurant and boysenberry jam than it was for its thrill rides.

“That event has spawned an entire industry,” Salisbury said.

And another family-owned theme park, this one in North Idaho, is carrying on that terrifying tradition.