We’re well into October now, which is possibly the best month if you live in New England. The weather is pretty perfect, and the atmosphere can be Hallmark Channel beatific or downright creepy, depending on which way you’re leaning. It also means that I go on my annual pilgrimage to the amazing Haunted Overload, in Lee, New Hampsire!

This attraction has been around since the early 2000s, and now has a permanent home at the lovely DeMerrit Hill Farm. It’s consistently ranked as one of the best haunted attractions in the country, and it is super deserving of the accolades. The scale of the place is difficult to capture in pictures; the figures, from giant scarecrows to looming hooded skeletons to the amazing Komodo dragon, are huge. Seamlessly integrated into the landscape, truly looking like they belong to the woods around them, these creatures really do dwarf you. The effect is cool and striking, and the sweep and variety of the tableaus, and their size, stand in stark contrast to more claustrophobic haunted house attractions.

As many large-scale models and areas as there are to explore at Haunted Overload, it’s the clear delight taken in the smaller details, too, which make it so unique and special to me. That nature is allowed to work on the built elements is so effective and allows for unexpected, eerie surprises- last year we found a beautiful oyster mushroom sprouting in a tree still growing through a dilapidated house. A Blair Witch-esque bower, woven out of mountains of sticks, has a deer head pushing out of a wall. Haunted Overload goes for the unusual rather than the safe; its folk-horrific leanings and arboreal setting allow the artists who design it to try out frights you don’t often see explored. This year the biggest new feature was a gargantuan wasp nest, complete with giant, malevolent insects, sacrificial victims bound in the hives, and weird, Mothman-ish wasp cultists. It’s so great and creative, and so exciting to see spooky designers refuse to repeat familiar tropes.

Haunted Overload is also immensely welcoming, which might be an odd descriptor for a place which features many examples of (fake!) dismemberment, horrifying circuses, malevolent woods-dwellers and the like. But its organizers understand that not everyone likes every level of fright, and they make many provisions for that. While going at night gives you the full gamut of jumpscares, with scare actors, lights, and sound effects, there are also nights with no actors lurking to scare the bejesus out of you, where you’re free to move at your own pace. My favorite are the weekend day hours, where you can appreciate the sheer imaginative exuberance of the place in full daylight; it’s also fun to see families enjoying it all during the days, too, where it is often touchingly obvious which kids are discovering their taste for horror and the spooky and which would prefer not to. Their staff and volunteers are unfailingly super friendly and clearly take well-deserved pride in how impressive the attraction is. It’s a running joke among my family and friends that this is the real happiest place on Earth, and for those of us who love this season and horror more generally, Haunted Overload comes pretty close to fitting that bill. I can’t recommend a trip more highly.