For anyone that’s a fan of dark rides especially the Haunted House or as its now known Duel at Alton towers there is only one real source for information about this ride and thats the haunted one website which has been updated recently.

There’s obviously alot of fans out there as we got together some time ago and wrote an article based on a behind the scenes tour and some history which was provided by the haunted one, this article is one of the most popular on this website with consistently over 1,500 views a month.

If you havent seen the site lately, check it out. http://www.hauntedone.co.uk/

Good luck with the new site Mik, im sure it will be a great success.

I was looking at the Lightwater Valley website earlier and for 2008 they have a very intresting pricing option which is bound to save some visitors a fair bit of money.

If you book in advance you can get park admission for as little as £7.95 a great saving on the current 2008 gate price of £16.95, based on been over 1.3m.

Lightwater Valley has some great attractions and although its not as big as other theme parks like Alton Towers its a great option for a day out if you are in that part of the country.

Last July (2006) Alton Towers opened the Peugeot 207 driving school with the primary audience of under 10’s. The attraction sponsored by Peugeot and costing the park £1m is based at the bottom of Cred street where a few other kiddie attractions are based. Its quite obvious from the description this is a driving school where kids not only drive small battery operated cars they also have the option of buying a driving license after the ride.

When queuing the kids all have their photographs taken and then they are lead out to a holding pen, once the pen is full the kids are walked through to the driving school where they get to pick their own single seat electric car. After a quick briefing by the staff the attraction is started on a 5 minute or so timer, after this period the cars just stop wherever they are and the kids get off and make way for the next bunch. In total they have about 20 cars operating at a time. Each car doesn’t go any faster than walking speed.

The arguement rages on over Duel vs the Haunted house and I don’t think we will ever get a group of enthusiasts to agree which was/is better. For me personally it has to be the Haunted House and one of the reasons I wrote this article

Ive split this article in two, initially ill take a look at a behind the scenes tour done during July 2007 this will be followed up with some history and photographs of the haunted house written by the Mik the editor of the Haunted one.

One of Alton Towers latest attractions as well as the Dung Heap kids area is Haunted Hollow, an in house project costing the park 250k. The Interactive walk through is using an existing short cut from Gloomy wood (opposite Duel) to Merrie England (near the boats). When I last visited the park during adrenalin week the attraction wasnt completed. During normal park operations this attraction isnt scary and even my youngest 5yr old found it quite fun. It should be fantastic if they use this area for the parks Halloween event later in the year from October 13th - November 4th. When the attraction first opened some of the gravestones were attacked by mindless vandels, Its nice to see Alton Towers has fixed these up again.

Remember a time when it was cool to have straight hair, stonewashed denim, t-shirts that changed colour when you got hot and spandex shorts. It was a time before B&M coasters graced alton towers and we had rides that were very tame in comparsion to todays launched and suspended coasters.

In 1992 a day at Alton involved long queues for rides like “The Thunder Looper” and “Corkscrew” the towers were open and you could walk around the whole towers getting lost. Here im going to take a trip back to 1992, I dont remember the date but it was sometime in the summer and id just bought my first SLR camera a Canon EOS 1000FN and didnt have a clue how to work it. For the trip id hired a brand new “Ford escort” which cost about £15.