Each year Karl and Tonya from When It Was Cool set out to discover a new haunted attraction, haunted house, or cool Halloween themed adventure. This year we decided to take on a large haunted attraction just north of Nashville, TN in the city of Madison called Nashville Nightmare.
As we usually do, we elected to purchase the “skip the line” tickets as these large, haunted attractions often draw thousands of people, especially the closer to Halloween you get. I have never regretted buying those tickets as the waits can sometimes be hours. We went mid-week on a Wednesday night and the lines weren’t too bad, but I imagine on the weekend they are substantial.
One of the things I really enjoyed about Nashville Nightmare was that the haunted attraction was split up into more bitesize bits. There were multiple separate haunted attractions which came with our ticket and doing the different sections with a small break in between was actually very nice. It took us just about an hour to go through the four we had a pass too, so it was just about the right amount of fun.
Neither Tonya nor I are big into the alien themed attractions, and it seems many of the larger haunted attractions lean heavily into this. Thankfully, this comprised just one section of Nashville Nightmare and we were soon onto more interesting stuff (for us, the aliens may well be your favorite thing and, if so, Nashville Nightmare did it quite well).
Our sweet spot at When It Was Cool is the macabre and Nashville Nightmare offered plenty of this for our liking. There was a wonderful, haunted schoolhouse section which offered some scary and inventive scenes we had never seen before. The atmosphere was tremendous, and we came away with several cool visuals from this neat and original theme.
The haunted mortuary hit our macabre sweet spot perfectly. While the funeral home / cemetery / haunted house theme is a standard for most haunted attractions (at least it should be, it seems to be getting more and more scarce) Nashville Nightmare did a fantastic job setting a creepy atmosphere. There was one scene both Karl and Tonya agreed was very memorable and perfectly captured the feel: an abandoned funeral chapel with a tree having crashed through crushing the casket complete with a rush of air blowing through the collapsed ceiling giving it a very realistic feeling.
I also have to commend them on skipping the cheap claustrophobic segments like the tired old “inflatable walls closing in on you” gimmick or the blackout maze rooms. These offer no real scares and serve only to make people uncomfortable, not scared.
Nashville Nightmare gets a huge recommendation from When It Was Cool and if you are in the Nashville area check out their website for ticket information. They are located at 1016 Madison Square: Madison, TN 37115.
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