I don't know if anyone else has already reviewed the new dark ride at Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh, but here is mine.

Ghostwood Mansion is in the same space as the old Gold Miner ride at Kennywood.  It is a dark ride in a electrically moved car which holds 4 riders.

  There is an orientation room at the beginning which the riders enter before getting in the cars.  In the orientation room, which is decorated to look like a Victorian parlor, with red brocade and family portraits on the walls, a large portrait of "Sir Kenneth Ghostwood" comes alive (by animated projection) to explain that he built the mansion as a refuge, but it has become populated by squatter ghosts.  Your mission is to shoot them with the laser guns in your car to get them out of the mansion. He says the highest scorer will get to stay in the mansion overnight.

Then the patrons walk up to the second floor to get into the cars.  These move very smoothly and silently into the mansion proper.  There are multiple rooms, decorated variously as living rooms, library, dining room, etc with animatronic, projected, static, and pneumatic props.

  Unfortunately, just about every surface is covered with small "bullseye" targets for you to aim at.  I say "unfortunately" because you spend so much time shooting the targets, you miss the actual props. The first time I went through, I didn't really see much of the actual mansion, I was concentrating on those stupid targets so hard.  By the way, the points are talied on a scoreboard in front of each rider, but they don't matter at all. You don't get to compare your scores to other players, and you don't get anything (even a night in the mansion) for having a high score. However, when you hit the target, the props are triggered to move, often with a little flash of light, so you don't really want to NOT shoot, or you will miss the props being activated. As the car goes through the mansion, there is a constant chatter and noise from the props, with so much overlap between the props and the target "pops" that it is difficult to determine which prop is saying what.

I went through the ride a second time and purposely did not shoot at anything so I could pay better attention. The props move very slowly and are far away from the cars (I guess to prvent folks from grabbing them), to that they are not surprising or scary in any way. As a matter of fact, when you aren't shooting, it's kind of dull. You got your basic run-of-th-mill mummies, corpses, skulls, ghostly figures in winding sheets. etc, none especially innovative. There were a few nice items, such as the graveyard stature that rises toward the car, or the lifesize hearse and skeleton horse (it neighs when you hit it's target).  There is a nice scissors-type action on a prop in the library that moves a ghost forward toward the car. There are a couple of slow giant spider drops.  I thought I could duplicate some of the family pictures on the wall that spun around when you hit their targets.

Altogether, it is a good concept to make the ride interactive, but it detracts from the actual enjoyment of the view. The view was not very exciting, slow and predictable. I guess they don't want to scare the little kids, but this ride was so "already been done" that it wouldn't scre anyone at all.  For the 30-45 minute wait to get in, I'd rather go see the Noah's Ark attraction, an old fashioned walk-through "fun house" that packs some real surprises after probably 50 years.  I even saw a kid crying at the end of Noah's Ark because he was scared.  That would never happen at Ghostwood Mansion.

My final grade for this ride? I give it a C-. It could have been so much more... 

Tags: Ghostwood MansionKennywood Pittsburgh Dark Ridereview Amusement Attr