Today we’d like to introduce you to Tony Wohlgemuth.
Hi Tony , so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I started Spookywoods in 1985 when I was 15 years old. The goal back then wasn’t to build a haunted attraction empire; it was to help save the family farm. I needed a way to make the land pay for itself, and a haunted trail through the woods was something I could build with my own hands and a lot of stubbornness.
That first season taught me something I’ve leaned on for forty-plus years: people don’t just want to be scared, they want to be *taken somewhere*. Once I understood that, everything changed. We stopped thinking of ourselves as a haunted house and started building worlds.
As we grew the business across the farm, we began moving people in massive wagons to the different themed areas. What started as a haunted house attraction has now grown into year-round family-focused entertainment. Our Zipline Tour, escape games, outdoor laser tag, the Maize Adventure, and Kersey Valley Christmas all attract close to 100,000 people yearly. The portal site to all our attractions can be found at www.kerseyvalley.com.
Today, Kersey Valley sits on 92 acres in Archdale, North Carolina, and Spookywoods is heading into its 42nd season. We’ve grown into a year-round operation with a large seasonal team, multiple immersive worlds, and a reputation in the haunt industry I’m proud of. My wife Donna and I received the Fear Carolina Crypt Keeper Award together in 2025, which meant a lot. This has always been a family operation at its core.
What I’m most excited about right now is what’s coming next. We have our largest haunted build yet in progress — a multi-year project that’s going to be something the industry hasn’t seen from us before. I’m keeping the details under wraps for now. I’m also hosting the Legendary Haunt Tour here on September 7, 2026, for vendors across the industry, and we’re continuing to push the creative side hard with projects like ICONS, our horror-movie tribute world built over water.
Forty-two years in, and I still believe the best season is the one in front of us. Where legacy meets legend, that’s not just a tagline. That’s the whole story.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
No road worth traveling is smooth, and ours has had plenty of rough patches.
The earliest struggle was the one that started it all, saving the family farm. I was 15 when I built the first version of Spookywoods, and I was learning everything on the fly. How to build sets, how to manage people twice my age, how to market something nobody in our area had really seen before. There was no playbook. Every mistake came out of my own pocket, and every lesson got paid for the hard way.
The weather has been a constant adversary. We’re an outdoor operation on 92 acres, and a few rainy weekends in October can wipe out a season’s worth of planning. You learn to build a business that can absorb those hits without breaking.
Then there’s the people side, which is the hardest part of any business. We run with a large seasonal team, and finding, training, and keeping the right people year after year is a full-time job in itself. I’ve invested deeply in folks, sometimes financially, sometimes by mentoring them for years, and not every one of those investments has paid off the way I hoped. That stings, but it doesn’t stop me from doing it again for the next person who shows promise.
COVID was its own chapter. When you’ve spent forty years building a business around bringing people together in close quarters, a global pandemic forces you to rethink everything overnight. Rather than sit on the sidelines, I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to safely open a haunted attraction during COVID, and I got it approved by the North Carolina Department of Health. Then I shared it with the haunt industry at no cost. Operators across the country used that guide as their blueprint to reopen their attractions when no one else had answers. That’s a moment I’m genuinely proud of, not just because we found a way to open our doors, but because we helped a whole industry find its footing.
And honestly, the creative pressure never lets up. Guests expect more every year. The industry moves fast. What was state-of-the-art a decade ago looks dated now. A good example is AI, we were creating projected scenes more than five years ago when it was a real technical challenge, custom work that took serious time and skill. Now, anyone can generate something similar with a simple prompt in an AI tool. What was once cutting-edge is commonplace, so staying ahead means constantly innovating on what’s next. That kind of reinvention isn’t optional. It means constant reinvestment in buildings, technology, and talent, and the math doesn’t always make sense on paper. You do it anyway because that’s what the work demands.
The struggles are real, but they’re also the reason we’re still here while many others aren’t. Every hard year taught us something the easy years never could.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Kersey Valley is a 92-acre family-owned entertainment destination in Archdale, North Carolina. We’ve been in operation since 1985. What started as a single haunted trail to help save our family farm has grown into one of the most diverse year-round entertainment operations in the Southeast.
Our flagship is Spookywoods, now in its 42nd season. It isn’t a haunted house. It’s a collection of fully immersive worlds, and guests travel between them in massive custom wagons. These are not hay bales on a flatbed. Every detail, from the wagons to the queue lines to the soundscape, is part of the experience. We don’t just want to scare people. We want to take them somewhere they’ve never been.
Beyond Spookywoods, we operate a full slate of attractions year-round. The Kersey Valley Zipline Tour is a multi-line course across the property. Our Escape Games include multiple themed rooms that we built and operate ourselves. Outdoor Laser Tag is a large-scale combat experience on real terrain. Indoor and Outdoor Axe Throwing offers groups, leagues, and walk-ins, with coached lanes available any night of the week. The Maize Adventure is our fall family attraction with a corn maze, activities, and farm fun. Kersey Valley Christmas closes out the year with a fully transformed holiday experience. We also host corporate events and private parties for groups up to 4,000 guests.
Together, these attractions bring close to 100,000 guests through our gates every year. The portal to all of it is www.kerseyvalley.com.
Behind all of it is the team. We run with 7 full-time employees year-round and 365 part-time team members across the seasons. That number isn’t an accident. It takes that kind of crew to operate at this scale and still deliver the level of detail our guests expect. Building, training, and keeping a team that size every year is one of the things I’m proudest of.
What sets us apart is that we build almost everything ourselves. We aren’t buying off-the-shelf attractions and dropping them on the property. We design, construct, theme, and operate our worlds in-house. That gives us creative freedom that other operators don’t have. It’s also what lets us innovate on things like projected scenes years before the rest of the industry catches up.
Brand-wise, what I’m most proud of is the reputation we’ve built within the haunt industry. When peers and operators across the country look to North Carolina, they look at us. The Fear Carolina Crypt Keeper Award that my wife, Donna, and I received in 2025 reflects that. We’re hosting the Legendary Haunt Tour here in September 2026, which brings industry vendors and operators from across the country to our property. You don’t get invitations like that by accident. You earn them over decades of doing the work right.
What I want readers to know is this. Kersey Valley isn’t a seasonal pop-up. It’s a 92-acre, year-round, family-built operation where four decades of obsession with guest experience have shaped every square foot. Whether you’re coming for a zipline ride in July, a corn maze in October, an axe-throwing night with coworkers, or to be terrified by Spookywoods in the dark, you’re stepping onto a piece of land that’s been crafted, refined, and reinvented for generations of guests.
Where legacy meets legend. That isn’t marketing copy. That’s what we actually do.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
There are many ways to work with us, and we genuinely enjoy the collaborative side of this business as much as the operational side.
The most direct way is to come visit. We’re open daily, year-round. Every ticket sold supports the team, the property, and the next round of builds. Between Spookywoods, the Maize Adventure, Kersey Valley Christmas, and our year-round attractions like the zipline, escape games, laser tag, and axe throwing, there’s always something open. You can find everything at www.kerseyvalley.com.
For groups, corporate teams, and private events, we host parties of any size up to 4,000 guests. Companies use us for team building, employee appreciation, holiday parties, and family days. We handle the planning, the catering connections, and the activities. You just show up. Reach out through the website, and we’ll build something custom to meet your needs.
In the haunt industry, we love opening our doors to other operators. I’ve shared what we’ve learned for decades now, whether that was through the COVID reopening guide we sent out at no cost or through the Legendary Haunt Tour we’re hosting here on November 7, 2026. If you’re an operator, vendor, or builder and you want to talk shop, walk the property, or trade notes on a build, I’m easy to reach.
For vendors and creative partners, we’re always interested in talented people. Sculptors, scenic builders, sound designers, costume makers, technology partners, animatronics builders, and effects specialists. If you make something cool, we want to know about it. We’ve built long-term relationships with a lot of the best people in the industry, and we’re always looking for the next one.
For media, content creators, and press, we’re open to coverage. We’ve had national outlets, podcasts, and YouTube channels visit over the years, and we love hosting people who want to tell the story. Coasters, Haunts, and Darkrides did a great piece on us in April 2026 titled “From Farm to Famous Haunt.” We’re happy to coordinate visits, interviews, and behind-the-scenes access for the right project.
For people who want to join the team, we hire year-round for full-time roles and seasonally for several hundred part-time positions. If you’ve ever wanted to act in a haunt, work in attractions, run a zipline, build sets, or learn the business from the inside, we’d love to hear from you. Apply at spookywoods.com.
The best support, though, is the simplest. Tell people about us. Bring your family. Bring your friends. Post a review. Share the experience. Forty-two years in, word of mouth is still the most powerful thing in this industry, and every guest who walks out and tells someone else is the reason we get to keep doing this.
Pricing:
- Maize Adventure and Kersey Valley Christmas: $25 per person
- Spookywoods: starting at $29.95
- Escape Games and Outdoor Laser Tag: $32 per person
- Zipline Tour: $69 to $79
- Group rates and corporate event pricing are available on request. Full details and tickets at www.kerseyvalley.com.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://kerseyvalley.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spookywoods
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spookywoods
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/kerseyvalley
