With Halloween right around the corner, it’s not too late to get a few more scares in before the big night.
Trey Smith’s XscapeWorks attraction is a collection of four escape games connected via time machine. But once daylight runs out, it undergoes a ghastly transformation. About 6 p.m. daily during the Halloween season, the puzzle-filled escape game turns into an interactive haunted house that challenges — and terrifies — all who enter.
“A lot of people have been through haunted houses,” Smith said. “A lot of people have played escape games. But here, you get a haunted escape game.”
Guests at 2430 Air Park Road in North Charleston enter through an automated time machine that sends one group at a time through a series of themed haunts, starting with a traditional haunted house, followed by a medieval castle, a mummy’s tomb and finally a zombie apocalypse. At every turn, guests are met with spooky surprises, animatronic scares and challenging puzzles. They also encounter some of the attraction’s 16 scare actors that breathe life into the experience.
“We space our groups out here about every 20 minutes,” Smith said. “We’re not cranking people through like a conga line. So each time you’re in an area with an actor, they are working only with your group. It’s much more specialized and much more individualized that way.”
Smith said while he’s not a Halloween enthusiast, he loves the freedom that the holiday gives him to come up with new ways to scare the pants off of — ahem, entertain — people.
“If you knew me outside of this, you would never really know that I do a haunt,” he said. “I don’t live and breathe Halloween, but I love the entertainment aspect. And I love the creative challenges of Halloween, because there are no boundaries. It’s whatever your imagination can come up with.”
Unlikely start
Smith, 60, of Park Circle, said 30 years ago, he never would have imagined he’d be doing what he is now. In 1990, he was in the audio music business in Nashville. He owned his own recording studio, but a move into a house on a commercial street left him without enough money to fix it up the way he needed.
Desperate, he went to his friend, a professional makeup artist, for help.
“That Halloween, we turned the house into a haunt, put signs up front and we killed it,” Smith said. “With the money we made, we finished the studio, but the next year, I opened up the haunt again, this time in a high school.’
Horror High was another commercial success, raising money to benefit a local police department where his father worked. A few years later, he had the largest recurring haunt in Tennessee.
In 2004, Smith and his wife moved to Charleston where they started Boone Hall Fright Nights, still one of the most popular Halloween events in the Lowcountry. But over the years, he said the limitations of an outdoor, holiday-only event wore on him.
“The Boone Hall thing was great, and we were doing large numbers, but every year, we ran into problems,” he said. “Hurricane potential, tropical storms — everything was outdoors. And all that is right on Halloween. So we kept running into all these challenges with Mother Nature.
“We had to build it and tear it down every year,” he added. “You’re out there in May, June, July, building a haunt in the middle of a field. After a while, I thought, ‘I need to move into something that we can keep year-round and indoors.’”
Plus, he wanted to start building more things, he said.
A busy workshop
In 2015, Smith broke away from Fright Nights to start Smithworks Creative Arts, a company that constructs interactive museum attractions and escape game pieces that get sent all over the country.
“We build pretty much everything that you see when you visit, and then some,” Smith said. “We just got a project out of here, we built a big thing for the South Carolina State Fair in Columbia for the 250th celebration. Our whole shop here was totally full, and now we’re getting reorganized and ready to start building some other stuff.”
He’s built King Kong, a Titanic replica and more for escape rooms across the nation. His structures are installed as far away as Honolulu, Anchorage, Canada, Bermuda. Recently, the company was contacted by a guy from England.
Despite the wide range of work, he says one of his favorite builds stayed pretty close to home: a runaway subway train escape game in Mount Pleasant (though there is another one in New York City).
But the workshop is also crammed with new additions to Smithworks’ own escape game.
“We have a bunch of new things we’re adding to the Medieval and Egyptian rooms,” Smith said. “We try to do things that are more physical. You’ll see quickly, ‘All right, I know what I got to do,’ but actually doing it is a whole other thing. We like adding those. We get a really good response from those.
Year-round entertainment
While the Halloween attraction gets a lot of attention, Smith said he always felt limited by the holiday theme.
“Halloween is great, but you only really get a month and a half,” he said. “I wanted to do something that creates an entertainment experience year-round.”
During the daytime, and when it’s not spooky season, the escape games remain fully open, and get a little more complicated.
“There’s other puzzles that are involved when we run the actual escape game, but we try to simplify it for the Halloween people, because there’s also actors here scaring you,” Smith said.
That’s also where the more physical, skill-based puzzles come into play.
“We’ve built a lot of escape games all over the country,” Smith said, “and the one thing I’ve noticed that’s pretty much universal — you’ll have one person that’s real into the puzzles. You’ll have one or two people trying to help them, and the rest are just there to hang out and pull stuff off the walls.”
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Groups can book their XscapeWorks experience online in one-hour blocks between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Completing all four escape rooms requires groups to book two blocks back-to-back. Groups can book the one-hour interactive XscapeWorks Halloween experience between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. XscapeWorks is located at 2430 Air Park Road in North Charleston.
Other places to get your scares this Halloween
Looking to get the most out of this last week of October? Charleston has no shortage of spooky events and destinations ready to open their creaky doors to visitors this Halloween.
From haunted houses, scary hay rides, ghost tours and more, there are plenty of opportunities left to fill your calendar with. This list is not exhaustive, but can serve as a quick jumping off point to fill in the last few gaps in your Halloween itinerary.
- Boone Hall Fright Nights. 2434 N. Highway 17. Mount Pleasant. boonehallfrightnights.com
- Southern Screams Haunted House. 1021 Aragon Ave. North Charleston. southernscreams.com
- Charleston Terrors. 28 Broad St. Downtown. charlestonterrors.com
- Charleston Ghost Walk Tour. 160 Church St., Suite B. Downtown. ghostwalk.net
- Ghost City Tours. Locations vary. ghostcitytours.com
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