Roodhouse considers bringing back Haunted Hayride

By Editor | August 5, 2025 |

By Carmen Ensinger

At a recent Roodhouse City Council meeting, the council discussed bringing back the Haunted Hayride at the Roodhouse Rez.
Mayor Jim Riley, who, along with his family and tons of volunteers, ran the hayride until the former city council shut them down.
“This is an event I am part of and people think that is why I want to bring it back,” Riley said. “But it did a lot for the town and brought in a lot of money to the Roodhouse community.
Riley said there were many positive things about the hayride, which was extremely popular during the Halloween season.
“For one thing, it offers the kids who need community service hours an opportunity to get those hours,” he said. “We have a lot of high school kids helping out and it helped them in many ways. We had some kids who admitted that they had social problems, but they formed their own group and it helped build their self-esteem and helped them become more sociable.”
The entire event is run by volunteers – no one gets paid for what they do. There are many people who operate the concession stand and even more people who become a part of the event, donning scary masks and doing their best to scare unwary visitors.
“We have a set of rules that all of our volunteers have to follow,” Riley said. “They must also sign a waiver, as must anyone who gets on the wagon. If they don’t sign a waiver, they don’t get to get on the wagon.”
It is also a nice little money-maker for the city.
“The last time we held it, I think it made $10,000 to $12,000,” Riley said. “And that was with us just charging $5 a ticket.”
Part of the attraction of the event is that it is affordable for everyone.
“We never wanted to charge more than $5 a ticket because we wanted people to be able to bring their family out and enjoy it,” Riley said. “We could easily charge more and we would probably still have people come, but we want to keep it family friendly.”
Riley said that this year the plans are to have some little carnival games for the kids to enjoy plus they want to build an escape room, which would cost an extra $5 to go through.
Perhaps the most appealing thing about the event is that it is self-sufficient.
“We build our own props by hand and everything we buy we buy out of our own pocket,” Riley said. “The stuff we built in the past, we still have a lot of it and it is ours. I wear a devil costume and bought a mask that cost $1,000 and it didn’t cost the city anything.”
Of course, it does take a little money to get the concession stand up and running.
“I think with buying everything for the concession stand that we initially spend about $400 to start with,” Riley said. “That gets us through the first weekend and from then on we are pretty much self-sufficient.”
Riley said that any odd building materials they may need, and the concessions, they spend less than $1,000 to get it up and going.
“Most of the stuff from the previous hayride is still out there,” he said. “We don’t really need anything to get it started back up.”
It is more work than what people might think.
“It takes us about two months to build,” Riley said. “The final year we were forced to do it in 17 days, but that was rushing it.”
The biggest issue is the use of the pavilion over by the campgrounds. That pavilion is usually turned into the haunted house and with it taking about two months to build, some of the campers might get upset by not having the use of the pavilion during their last few weeks camping.
“At the end of the day, your campers are the number one source of income at the Rez,” Alderman Gage Giberson said. “So, we have to keep them happy. Part of their rental fee includes the use of that pavilion and we need to keep it open for them.”
That is not to say that Giberson was against the hayride.
“My thing would be if you waited to do that till the very last minute,” he said. “Set up everything else and try to come up with some kind of alternative to allow them to use the pavilion and then when they leave for the summer you can roll right in.”
Alderman Steven Pope made a motion to table the issue for now, which Giberson seconded.