The best dark rides in North America, outside of a Disney or Universal park

The first Justice League dark ride for Six Flags opened in 2015 at Six Flags over Texas and was a smash hit. This brings the beloved DC comic universe character to life in a 4D interactive dark ride world, featuring both real-world props and animatronics, as well as digital big-screen battles.

A second version opened soon after at the St. Louis park in 2015, followed by clones at Six Flags Mexico and Six Flags Great America in 2016, Six Flags over Georgia and Great Adventure and Magic Mountain in 2017.

Altogether there are seven total versions of the ride, and unfortunately the upkeep and quality level of each version may be different from the rest, but the end result, as designed, is a top-tier level dark ride experience that Six Flags’ guests all seem to enjoy.

As a brand new theme park that just opened in 2022, one of the key things the operators knew that Lost Island needed was an awesome dark ride, designed to fit into the park’s unique theme and lore.

The new Volkanu ride [pictured, top] was created with the help of Sally Dark Rides ticks all the boxes, coming in at number two on my list of the top dark rides across North America. This features trackless vehicles, 4D projection screens, an interactive targeting system, and a custom storyline custom-made just for the Lost Island park.

The end result looks to be a lot of fun and features a mix of real-world animatronics and scenery mixed in with projection screen technology and gaming systems.

Another old-time Knott’s classic dark ride experience on my list of the top dark rides in North America, the Calico Mine Ride first opened in 1960, with guests being taken through an old mine by an engineer who reveals all the secrets of the mine along the way.

Numerous updates and revisions have been performed to the attraction over the years, including an extensive update that opened in 2014. The various scenes have frequently been modified to include Christmas and Halloween overlays over the years as well. The end result is a bit hard to describe, other than it is a family-friendly attraction and at the core is something that you would only see at Knott’s Berry Farm.

Starting off life as the Monster Plantation in 1981, the dark ride now known as Monster Mansion opened in 2009 following an extensive renovation of the Monster Plantation concept overseen by the Goddard Group (now known as Legacy Entertainment).

At the heart of it all, you can tell that the entire experience was created to feel like a very Disney dark ride-style project, with fantastic custom monster characters, a theme song and more. Over the years the park has continued to upkeep this fantastic dark flume attraction, including all new refurbishments to the characters, costumes, restoring animatronics and more for the 2023 season.

While this may really be more of a roller coaster than a dark ride, it starts and ends the experience passing through some dark ride environments. You won’t find many roller coasters that start by having guests climb to the top of a tall themed station building and the first thing the cars do is drop into the creepy darkness of the lower half of the building themed like a haunted mine shaft.

The car climbs a vertical lift and leaves the building for a brief bit of outside track before returning inside. Then it climbs a long dark vertical lift hill ending with a fire-packed spectacle, before taking a 95º beyond vertical plunge into darkness for the big coaster finale.

The ultimate classic log ride at Knott’s Berry Farm first opened in 1969 as Knott’s answer to create a Disney-style attraction of their own. Over the years the log flume has been remodelled and improved, and features a number of scenes and animatronic characters throughout the journey, with the last major update taking place in 2013.

Even today this remains one of the most popular attractions at Knott’s Berry Farm and one of the top dark rides in North America. It even served as an inspiration to Disney Imagineering when they first set about designing the first Splash Mountain attraction.

This video game-style interactive dark ride opened at the park in 2021 as a sequel of sorts of a former dark ride that inhabited the same space from 1975 to 1986 called Knott’s Bear-y Tales.

The building was used for two other completely different dark rides over the intervening years (Kingdom of the Dinosaurs and Voyage to the Iron Reef), but Knott’s guests always fondly remembered the Bear-y Tales, so finally the park created this new ride to virtually bring that retired IP back to life once again.

See also: Engaging a new generation of fans: Triotech on the return of Knott’s Bear-y Tales

Mack Rides and SeaWorld teamed up to create their first Water Coaster ride in 1998, featuring an extensive dark flume ride environment, lots of practical sets and scenery, and a twisting roller coaster finale drop at the end.

Unfortunately, the storyline became a little muddy and hard to follow unless you were paying attention, and over the years what was one of the best dark ride concepts outside of Disney and Universal has been simplified to the point where they really don’t even seem to be trying to tell a story any longer.

The ride system remains intact of course, offering a great experience, but this ride could be so much more, and easily take the top spot if given the chance.

A unique ride created to open with the new Legoland New York theme park in 2021, this unique ride features modern trackless vehicles and a crazy story that has the riders turned into mini-figs just before going on a wild adventure, featuring both real-world props and some all-digital scenes along the way.

In true Legoland fashion, I imagine we will see this ride eventually cloned to appear and other Legoland parks in the future.

For this project, experience designer Holovis worked with Merlin Magic Making, providing turnkey scenic, technical, and media content solutions. The trackless ride system was created by ETF Ride Systems.

You don’t hear much about this ride, but it’s a gem. The original Teroride underwent a complete renovation ahead of the 2017 season and looks fantastic these days.

 

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The end result is a classic style dark ride experience with small individual cars that travels through large very well-decorated and lit sets, offering a highly detailed experience.

The current version of the Haunted Castle at SCBB opened in 2010, replacing a much older version of the dark ride that operated under the same name.

 

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This is a custom-designed dark ride experience taking guests into a spooky and dark haunted house-style experience featuring a great soundtrack, lighting and special effects along the way. The update team did a great job creating a prime example of what a modern haunted house dark ride should be like.

Not all dark rides on my list of the top offerings across North America are located inside theme parks. This one is actually free to ride and sits just outside the Hersheypark theme park as part of the Hershey Chocolate World retail experience store.

As you might guess by the name, it is a semi-educational dark ride about how Hershey’s Chocolate is made. It features an extensive array of animatronic figures, singing cows, a music score and digital effects along the way. The end result is a dark ride that has a very Disney/Epcot vibe to it, done at a high-quality level.

This new dark ride concept moves riders past a series of scenes where they can battle along with the Ninjago warriors.

Unlike every other dark ride, the guests aren’t given guns or anything at all to hold in their hands. Instead, the ride was the first to use a gesture-based targeting system, allowing each of the four riders to fight the enemy in their own unique way just by waving their hands in the right direction.

Disney would use this same concept a few years later for a Spider-Man-themed dark ride that opened at Disney California Adventure.

The Reese’s Cupfusion dark ride opened at Hersheypark in 2019 as a replacement for the previous dark ride, Reese’s Xtreme Cup Challenge. The ride keeps the same Reese’s Cup branding, but gives it a new secret agent theme, asking riders to defend the Crystal Cup from evil candy invaders attempting to steal it.

The attraction uses a mix of real sets, two and three-dimensional props and figures, and both real-world targets and some interactive digital screen target scenes. Raven Sun Creative and Sally Dark Rides worked on this project.

A fantastic-looking lego themed adventure ride into the mummy’s tomb at is next on my list of the top dark rides in North America. This gives guests the chance to shoot at targets along the way.

Impressive sets, lighting and overall effects are great throughout the dark ride, where everything fits right into the Lego theme of it all while keeping it family-friendly for all ages to enjoy.

Knoebels has a reputation for not only offering a collection of classic rides at the park but also for taking a lot of loving care and maintenance over its ageing collection.

For this reason, the park’s fans have had a long love affair with the park’s Haunted Mansion dark ride, which features classic haunt-style dark-ride pacing with back-to-back gags, a lot of zig-zag track and flashy lighting effects.

Restored in 2022, this is more of a classic style dark ride experience that sends riders around a highly themed interior experience seated in small two-passenger cars.

 

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The attraction at Morey’s Piers is two levels and features extensive scenes, animatronics, music and lighting to bring the spooky experience to life for guests.

Designed to offer a similar experience and theme as Fire in the Hole at Silver Dollar City, Blazing Fury opened in 1978. Back then the park was also called Silver Dollar City (1976 to 1985) and it features a number of similar attractions to the sister park in Missouri.

Blazing Fury features a number of small improvements to the original design and has been very well kept up by the Dollywood staff over the years, including replacing the track with new rails custom-made by Rocky Mountain Construction.

This is a self-made dark ride at the park (1972) that slowly takes guests around a slow mid-western town until a fire breaks out and starts to spread. The ride system is basically a roller coaster, where the train is slowly powered and slowly moving uphill through the building to end at the higher levels where there are a few roller coaster-style drops as the finale.

It’s great fun and I’m sorry to say that the park has announced that 2023 will be the last season you can ride Fire in the Hole. However, rumor has it that a modern engineered replacement is currently under construction to open as a surprise in 2024.

Next on my list of the top dark rides in North America is this classic horror-style dark ride experience. It offers all the classic gags you would expect as the track twists and turns through the darkness, lighting up the various scenes for a few seconds as you pass and move on to the next.

 

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Given the age of the ride, some of the props are getting a bit old and hokey looking, but hopefully, a good refresh could improve things greatly.

Kennywood opened this new dark ride experience in 2008, replacing the park’s former Gold Rusher dark ride.

 

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The haunted house theme featured a number of practical, animatronic and digital effects, and originally arms guests with blaster guns to fight off the ghosts to see who can get the best score.

Ghost Hunt actually opened way back in 1999 as the first of many Ghost Blasters-style attractions from Sally Dark Rides. However, this all changed when the ride was updated again in 2008, replacing the old 2-seater dark ride cars with new 4-seater trackless EFT Mystic Mover vehicles.

Many scenes were renovated or completely changed, and in 2017 the ride was updated once again by Lagotronics to replace the old interactive system with a new set of cutting-edge guns and targets, a new show control system, and in 2020 a few view digital effects were also added to enhance the ride experience from Sally.

The result has been to create an attraction experience that is never static, and always ready to be updated to feature the latest innovations, which also keeps the guests interested in seeing the new features.

This is yet another mine-themed dark ride, but it is also a traditional dark ride, featuring an extensive series of well-lit scenes along the way.

 

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The deeper into the mine you go, the weirder things get, leading to an encounter with mummies, snakes, a pharaoh’s curse and what may have been the grim reaper himself.

In 2012 Knoebels opened Black Diamond after saving the ride system from Dinosaur Beach, where it ran as Golden Nugget.

Much like the Underground previously on this list of the top dark rides in North America, this is an all-indoor dark wooden roller coaster-style experience that takes guests down into the depths of the Black Diamond Mine which seems to suffer from a bit of a supernatural curse.

If the name didn’t give it away, this is actually a real mini-train ride. Guests climb on board the train and travel into a nearby cave where they travel back in time to visit the fun world of the prehistoric “cave people” that used to live by the beach.

 

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No jump scares here, just good family fun as you pass through the brightly lit blacklight scenes to see cave people bars, musicians, food stands, beachgoers, dino wranglers, and more.

Silver Dollar City offers this unique slow-moving boat ride, taking riders through an underground mine that’s been converted for use as a prison that is now slowly flooding.

 

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The charming ride experience from 1968 features numerous animatronics and music and somehow gives off a vibe similar to what you might feel while riding Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean as you watch the various prisoners try to figure out how to escape. At some point, a series of interactive targets were added to the ride’s various scenes adding an interactive element to the ride, for better or worse.

What started out as another Sally Dark Ride / Scooby-Doo variant dark ride was completely transformed in 2019 to feature an all-new pirate theme unique to Six Flags Fiesta Texas.

While it features beautiful scenery, the slightly obnoxious-sounding guns do take away from the overall experience as riders get lost in the target-shooting gameplay aspect.

In a partnership between the now defunct Paramount Parks chain and Sally Dark Rides, four versions of this attraction concept based on Sally’s Ghost Blasters ride concept were originally built with a custom Scooby-Doo theme. These rides opened at King Dominion, Carowinds, and Canada’s Wonderland as individual car attractions. The former Phantom Theater at Kings Island which uses an omnimover-style ride system also was transformed.

When Paramount sold the chain to Cedar Fair, the Scooby Doo theming was removed and replaced with the current ‘Boo Blasters’ theme instead, keeping much of the same theming and concepts throughout each ride and mainly just replacing the Scooby Doo IP. On a technical side, many features of these rides were upgraded as well when they were rethemed.

Ghost Blasters at Mall of America is probably the most common dark ride style ride we’ve seen from Sally Dark Rides over the years. They sometimes have slightly different names, but typically take guests on a blacklight ride through a glowing haunted house, arming the riders with ghost blasters to shoot at targets on the ghosts and other objects along the way, plus screens to show off which rider got the better score.

They are great fun, but sometimes the chaotic nature of these interactive style rides takes away from the dark ride atmosphere.

As the name implies, this is a classic log ride attraction that travels through a series of themed dark caves and past various animatronics as it travels along the fake mountain built for the theme park inside the Mall of America.

 

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Everybody loves a good log ride.

Meow Wolf, the creators of modern interactive art attraction locations knew they were going to be building a whole attraction nearby, so they partnered up with Elitch Gardens to revamp the park’s dark ride in 2019 as the world’s first-ever Meow Wolf dark ride experience.

The crazy dark ride experience worked, serving not only as a way to introduce the local market to the concept of Meow Wolf but also continuing to act as a real-world preview of what they can expect if they visit the nearby Meow Wolf Convergence Station attraction that opened in 2021.

Imagine a steel roller coaster designed to climb up the side of the fake mountain and vanish inside a cave. Then arm the riders with interactive guns as the train moves slowly past a series of projection screens where they can shoot at targets before ending the experience with a trick freefall drop track effect.

I’m not sure if the story makes much sense, but the riders sure get to screaming when they suddenly plunge into the darkness.

A classic Bill Tracy-designed dark ride experience is hard to find these days, and finding one as well-kept as the Whacky Shack is even harder.

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The Whacky Shack has been enjoyed by guests at the park since it opened in 1970 and has been carefully maintained over the years by the park.

As a fun throwback to the long-retired Speelunker’s Cave dark ride that ran from 1964 to 1991, Six Flags over Texas opened the Pirates of Speelunker Cave in 2022.

The slow-moving flume ride was appreciated by long-time fans of the park for bringing back the Speelunker theme, but after only being open a few months, flooding in the park caused damage to the new dark ride. It is hoped that it will reopen later this year.

Perhaps one of the more interesting alternative concepts for what would traditionally be considered an interactive/shooter-style dark ride, this entry on my list of the top dark rides in North America comes from the team at Sally Dark Rides.

Located in the Thanksgiving holiday section of the Holiday World theme park, riders are tasked with collecting turkeys for the Thanksgiving feast. Instead of giving the riders ‘guns’ to shoot with, they are instead given ‘Turkey Callers’ to flush out the hiding birds.

The current attraction at the park opened in 2020 and comes from the creative forces at the Sally Dark Ride Company. Really, it is an update to the park’s previous Great Humbug dark ride that first opened back in 2000.

Loosely themed to the lore of “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, riders enter the mansion of Ebenezer Scrooge for the adventure. The current version features an interactive ride system asking guests to target and tickle ‘Humbug’ creatures throughout the mansion to help spread Christmas joy.

The Old Mill is the oldest ride at Kennywood. It originally opened way back in 1901, but over the decades the ride has been modified, rebuilt and altered many times. As such the theming inside and story have also changed over the years, with one version even being themed as Garfield’s Nightmare, centering around the comic and animated cat.

Today’s version is more of a throwback to a previous theme featuring the adventures of Harold, a skeleton dressed as a cowboy. Unlike the other rides mentioned so far, this one is a slow-moving tunnel of love-style flume ride, with a family-friendly theme and atmosphere.

Technically this hybrid creation is more roller coaster than dark ride, featuring a mix of outdoor wooden roller coaster track sections mixed with brief indoor scenery and special effects as the cars pass through the mountain structure repeatedly along the journey.

Built by Custom Coasters International in 2002 to replace the park’s former Superstition Mountain traditional dark ride, it features odd-looking custom ride carts offering both forward and backwards seating options all while enclosing the riders inside a padded mesh interior.

The ride experience actually starts out with a fun elevator lift to the top of the mountain rather than a lift hill. Odd, bumpy, and somewhat confusing…in the end a ride of LoCoSuMo is not one you will ever forget, as it provides some of the real world mine-train style thrills that other rides only simulate.

Not to be confused with the other Adventureland in New York, this small park in Iowa created The Underground. The surprise here is that this fully enclosed ride is actually a wooden roller coaster, built by Custom Coasters International back in 1996 using what appears to be PTC style wooden coaster trains. From there the similarities end however, as the ride attempts to transport guests down into the darkness of a mine.

 

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Dark is the key word here, as the entire experience is a very very dark one, with only glimpses here and there of scenery as you move around

This modern two-story tall dark ride experience was added to the park in 2018. It was purchased from Gosetto of Italy as a replacement for the park’s former haunted house, which was retired during the previous season.

 

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The ride features a more unique overhead style track system, with the riders in vehicles suspended under the track that seemingly float through the attraction. Like the vast majority of dark rides at smaller parks, this would be classified as a haunted house themed experience. It features a lot of jump scares and a mixture of practical and projection based effects.