Hauntings at the Hermitage — The Experience

We are currently moving. Today, in fact. The day before Halloween. And since I have no idea what my new neighborhood does for Halloween, I sought out alternatives. My two year old is just now old enough to really enjoy pretending to be someone/something else. And while he doesn’t yet know what ‘candy‘ is, he certainly likes it when people give him things. So, we headed to Hauntings at the Hermitage last Saturday to give him at least a taste (though not literally) of what Halloween could be.

My train-obsessed boy is an engineer this year. I didn’t even THINK about trying to create this costume myself—though it would have been easy. See above, re: moving. Boxes and packing tape don’t mix very well with glue guns and sparkles. (Especially when you don’t know how to use them!)

I don’t know what it was about the place, but as soon as we got to The Hermitage, my son went absolutely nuts. Maybe it was his costume, maybe it was seeing other kids in their costumes, or maybe he has a deep, deep love of Andrew Jackson. While I got my tickets, he was running around like a mad man with the entourage we brought along (husband, two grandmas, one grandpa). There weren’t even a ton of decorations out front. But he definitely picked up on the fact that he was about to have a ton of fun.

It was a little drizzly that day, and we got there right when it started, so it took a while for things to get into gear. We mistakenly waited to get into the mansion, only to find out that it was an actual tour of the mansion (not a spooky tour or anything). We got out of there pretty quickly, as 2 year olds and antique place settings do not mix very well. They were very nice about it.

We continued along the path, passing up a lot of the booths, because the kid was going nuts. He stopped to get a few treats from people dressed in period garb, but he wasn’t interested in the potion-mixing or the booth where someone tells you how chocolate is made. He did really like pretending to grind the cocoa nibs. They were giving away hot chocolate at that booth. that got MY attention. Yum.

The kid loved all of the pumpkins, and he even got his own tiny pumpkin to color (the older kids were painting them). He may have had a little help from two parents who should probably never draw.

The scary storytelling was a little too scary for our son. We lasted about a minute before he was screaming. I would suggest reserving this for children a little older (and with a little more ‘scare’ tolerance).

The highlight of the day for the kid was the hayride. It wasn’t exactly the ride that he loved, it was more the tractors that were pulling us. He’s two after all. The ‘ghosts’ we encountered along the way weren’t too scary for him (yay!). We probably didn’t even need to do our high-voiced, hurried explanations of how it was ‘so! much! fun! to! pretend!’ He was a pretty cool customer.

Things you should know before you go next year:

• While it’s great that the event starts early for the little ones, I think we missed most of what makes Hauntings at the Hermitage great. Once it gets dark, I hear they change a lot of it up for the older kids.
• Maybe don’t go RIGHT when it starts. We got there at 4, and it seemed like they weren’t really ready for us. The ‘ghosts’ were just leaving for their spots, so we had to wait about an hour and a half for the hayride to start.
• If you take a picture at the #Spookbooth and post it to Instagram, you could win this really cool bear and be Awesome Mom for an hour or so. I hope they have that again next year. Awesome Mom is fun.