It’s Halloween, bats and witches are flying, and chill is in the air. What better way embrace this time of year than to visit a haunted house? St. Louis is home to three nationally renown Haunted Houses: the Darkness, Creepyworld, and the Lemp Brewery. All are part of Scarefest’s Trilogy of Terror. These haunted houses tend to get all around appropriately frightened reviews.

“My side hurt the whole time because every time my friend got scared she grabbed my side, which is the main reason I screamed every time someone popped out,” junior Raymond Che who went to the Darkness said.

The Darkness is located in St. Louis and costs $25 for entry. According to the Scarefest website, it is rated America’s Best Haunted House. Many say that it is the scariest of the three.

“First there was this real creepy butcher shop thing,” Che said, “After that there was a mirror maze and people just kept popping out at us.”

For a longer night full of fright, Creepyworld is your best bet. Consisting of seven haunted houses with various themes such as zombies, quarantine, and slaughter house, it takes around two hours to walk through the whole attraction. These houses change from year to year to make the experience equally as scary each time visited. The highlight of the experience for sophomore Ariel Kirkpatrick and junior Courtney Vishy was a paintballing range where they were taken on a hayride to shoot at ‘zombies’ with paintballs.

“The scariest part was when I was lost in the maze by myself. I found a random couple and held on to them for dear life,” Vishy said, recounting her experience at Creepyworld.

It is easier to suppress fear when knowing deep down that is isn’t real. However, there is no such reassurance when visiting the Lemp Brewery, a place where five deaths speculated to be suicides occurred. This haunted brewery is St. Louis’s only real haunted house (said to have actual ghosts) and the journey will take you through haunted caves and caverns five stories underground. Some, such as Kirkpatrick, preferred Creepyworld to the Lemp Brewery, but a possible explanation could be that the reality is just too scary.

“I have been to Lemp Brewery but my favorite one would have to be Creepyworld because it is seven houses in one,” Kirkpatrick said.