A new haunted maze coming to Knott’s Scary Farm mashes up two very different fears into a nightmare scenario combining web-spinning spiders and dying women living out their final days in a decaying nursing home.
Knott’s Scary Farm 2024 will feature 10 haunted mazes, five scare zones and four live shows on select nights from Sept. 19 to Nov. 2 at the Buena Park theme park.
The new Widows maze brings together two types of widows: Black Widow spiders who burrow into the bodies of widowed women living in a convalescent home in the midst of a catastrophic arachnid attack.
“I like to take two disparate things and smash them together,” said Knott’s Berry Farm maze designer Daniel Miller. “I came up with the title first, which was a smash up of spiders and older women.”
The Widows haunted maze also brings together two types of fears: Arachnaphobia (fear of spiders) and gerascophobia (fear of aging).
“Part of the reason why I did this was because I’m terrified of spiders,” Miller said during a tour of the Widows maze. “I think also, for some reason, we get kind of freaked out when we visit convalescent homes.”
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The idea for a spider-based maze came from a casual conversation Miller had about his worst fears. He had just been walking his dog the night before when he inadvertently strolled into a huge spider web.
“Apparently, I’m not sure if it’s true or not, the number one fear for men is to walk into a spider web,” Miller said.
The backstory for the Widows maze involves a clutter of demonic spiders that have burrowed up from underground and are taking over the bodies of aging women in the Sunset Rise Nursing Home for Wayward Widows.
“So that’s what we’re stepping into,” Miller said. “We’re visiting grandma and all of a sudden we say, ‘Oh, what’s happening to grandma?’”
The Widows maze is broken in two parts: The Sunset Rise convalescent home and the Cave of Arachne the Spider Goddess.
Visitors enter the Widows maze through an old Victorian mansion turned into a nursing home in 1892.
Miller likes to keep his mazes super dark. This year, the darkness will make it easier to hide the most basic staple of any home haunt that will be found throughout the Widows maze: Clear monofilament strands hanging from overhead rafters that drag over you as you pass by.
Webcasters that use pressurized air to spray hot glue will be used throughout the maze to create photorealistic spider webs in the corners of every room.
“The whole thing is supposed to be covered in webs,” Miller said.
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At the nurses station just inside the maze, an elderly resident has been impregnated with a belly full of baby spiders.
As visitors move through the nursing home, they see spider egg sacs in the corners of bedrooms, grandmothers transforming into spiders in bathrooms and a massive spider attack underway in the kitchen.
“There’s Orb Weavers, Black Widows and Daddy Long-Legs that all have different shapes and sizes to them,” Miller said.
At the midway point, visitors pass through a portal into Arachne’s Realm where the Sisterhood of Spiders dwells.
“This is where, theoretically, every guest gets stung,” Miller said. “So from this point on, it could get weird.”
After passing a bubbling venom pit, a spider’s nest filled with hatching eggs and through a hall of twisting thorns you’ll reach the Temple of Daddy Long-Legs. The finale brings visitors face-to-face with a Spider Minotaur who is half woman and half gigantic spider.
Building the Widows maze has helped Miller somewhat overcome his fear of spiders.
“It’s a cathartic experience,” Miller said. “I always want to make a maze about something I’m scared of. I know if it frightens me, it’s definitely going to frighten other people. I have a pretty high tolerance of terror and fright.”
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The new Widows maze is one of two new mazes debuting this year at Knott’s Scary Farm.
The Eight Fingers Nine: The Boogeyman maze takes visitors inside a Grimm’s Fairy Tale gone horribly wrong where a vengeful boogeyman eats people while they sleep.
The eight returning legacy mazes include: Chilling Chambers (2023), Cinema Slasher (2023), Room 13 (2023), Bloodline 1842 (2022), Grimoire (2022), Mesmer: Sideshow of the Mind (2021), Origins: Curse of Calico (2019) and Wax Works (2019).
The Depths and Dark Entities mazes were retired at the end of the Knott’s Scary Farm 2023 season.
