User Review Policies

PLEASE NOTE: Only registered, logged-in users can rate or review haunted houses on this site! Once you have logged in, choose the haunted house* you want to review or rate.

  • To rate a haunt, select a star from 1 to 5 (1 is lowest, 5 is highest).
  • You can only rate each haunted house once.
  • All reviews submitted are checked and approved by HauntedHouseChicago.com staff.

*To choose the haunted house(s) you want to rate/review, you can either use the Search Box there on the right, or go to the Haunted House listings page and simply scroll to the attraction(s) you’re looking for.

TIPS ON WRITING A REVIEW THAT WILL GET PUBLISHED:

  1. Please be as descriptive as possible when entering your review. Reviews that consist of little more than comments such as “great”, “horrible”, “fun”, “we go every year”, etc. don’t really give our site users any meaningful info; they’ll be looking to your reviews for information and guidance about Chicago’s haunted attractions, so when writing your review, think about what you’d want to know about the haunt you’re reviewing.
  2. Understand the difference between a review and an opinion. An opinion is how you feel about something; a review is an opinion that you can back up with examples, anecdotes and/or facts. We favor reviews over opinions while acknowledging that it can be hard to tell the difference. Loved a haunted house and want to tell the world? Great! But if all you can manage is “It was awesome – everybody should check it out!”, well, that’s not a review. That’s your opinion, and without giving your opinion any kind of context, it’s kind of useless to anybody that doesn’t know you (like the users of this website) – tell us why it was awesome. Why should everybody check it out?
  3. Be specific about what you like and don’t like. This gives our readers a frame of reference for what you think is scary, and is more likely to help somebody make an informed decision about what haunted house(s) to visit.
  4. Be careful using absolutes like “the scariest” or “the best” or “the worst”. Unless you’ve been to every haunted house in the area, you can’t know that. “The scariest I’ve been to” or “the best experience I’ve had” are more reasonable, again providing context for what you’re saying.
  5. Don’t end your review with something like “save your money and go to [insert haunt name here]” or “[insert haunt name here] was way better!”. If you want to put in a good word for a haunted house, write a positive review for it; don’t try to make your favorite haunt look better by ripping on its competition. Such comments will be stripped out of a review if possible; otherwise, the review will simply be rejected.
  6. Submitting a negative review? Consider also writing a positive one for a haunted house you liked. We get 5 negative reviews for every 1 positive, which makes it hard to provide a clear and balanced view of the haunted houses out there.
  7. Be respectful of the people you’re writing about. Many haunted attractions are created to benefit charities, while others are simply people who love Halloween and haunting, and in both cases the actors and staff may very well be unpaid volunteers who are giving up their time to entertain you. As such, reviews which insult or belittle attraction staff will be rejected. Don’t Be A Monster!
  8. Angered by a review you read? Think it’s unfair? Rather than emailing us and chewing us out over a review we didn’t write, consider writing your own review and setting the record straight!