The Scare Woods

A while ago, this quirky little place started popping up on social media, showing what appeared to be a load of Halloween decorations scattered around some woods. Nobody really knew what it was, but there was plenty of speculation, suggesting airsoft or paintball. Given that it's a cool, quirky and unique spot, it started trending with the urbex community, which isn't much of a surprise. But when a livestream said exactly where it was, to an audience in the thousands, I knew it probably wouldn't last long. Reluctantly I concluded that I should also go there while there's still stuff to see. I don't like doing things this way. I'd much rather go where I feel like going when I fancy an adventure, rather than moving with a sense of urgency to beat the herd before the herd destroys something. Such a dynamic is what ultimately led me to stop paying attention to what the urbex community was doing, and what locations were trending. It just takes the fun away.

So I went here about a year ago, while it was still relatively fresh and awesome. I have no idea what any of it looks like now.

 

 

There's a really nice atmopshere here. It's very calm and peaceful for a place that has a coffin floating in a pond, next to a skeletal torso. There's numerous cross-shaped graves dotted around too.

 

 

It was the graves that allowed numerous clever urbexers, the finest minds of our generation, to conclude that this was a film set for an old TV show called "In The Flesh." So I decided to give it a watch to see for myself.

It's actually an okay show. It's some kind of zombie drama, but not quite the civilisation-ending apocalypse we've come to associate with the undead. The zombie uprising has been and gone, coming to an end when some scientists came up with a drug that could restore a zombies higher brain functions, essentially making them functioning members of society again, albeit ones haunted by flashbacks of the atrocities they've commited, and reliant on regular doses of the drug in order to keep themselves from going feral. The story revolves around a young rehabiliated zombie who returns to his small town, where the small town folk hate zombies, meaning it's not a safe place for him to be.The point is driven home hard in the very first episode when the old chap across the road is revealed to be hiding his undead elderly wife, and a vigilante gang raid the house, drag her out and execute her in the middle of the street.

 

So it seems at first to be a vague attempted metaphor for discrimination against minorities, with the example above being reminiscent of hiding Jews in Nazi Germany. But the publics response to the undead in the community does soften gradually over time, and the shows LGBT presence naturally steers the metaphor in that direction.

But it doesn't really work given that peoples hatred and mistrust for the undead is kinda justified, what with them coming back from the dead and trying to eat everyone- something the LGBT community has sadly yet to do. But as awesome as that would be, I think there's a difference between fearing the undead because they killed a load of people, and Boomer McBoomerface, with his profile picture of a dog, losing his temper on facebook because a thousand miles away there's a teenager he'll never meet who has a nob but wants to go by Mary and wear dresses. Thankfully the show does get more nuanced and I actually really liked it. It actually does feel like a realistic take on how humans would react in such a situation.

 

Anyway, my motivation for watching it, of course, was primarily to get screenshots so that I could compare the scenes from the show to this place, that the urbex community had used their amazing powers of deduction to conclude was the location where it was filmed. 

Bellow are a few blurry screenshots. 

 

 

The videos I found online were shoddy quality, but the graves are the same.

 

 

That house in the background must be CGI, because it sure as hell isn't in these woods, and the urbex community surely wouldn't have got something so obvious so wrong.

 

 

Okay, so it might be easy to dismiss these graves, what with them just being non-descript white crosses. The link between this place and the show is tenuous. But if one looks closely, there are names on little gold plates on all of them.

 

 

And if one watches the show, the same name signs are on the white crosses too.

 

So these are absolutely 100% the graves from "In The Flesh," but the more conclusive proof is the grave of Danny Martin.

 

 See, this exact grave shows up in the last episode of "In The Flesh."

 

 

Alas, Danny isn't undead, just regular dead, and his sister sure is miffed about that. But I don't want to say too much, because of spoilers.

I gotta admit, sarcasm aside, it is kinda cool to be looking at props from an actual TV show. I don't think I've ever featured anything quite like this in my blogs before.

 

 

In the TV show, the white crosses are the graves of those who died fighting the zombies, and they're all in this little square enclosure far from any bodies of water, so imagine my bemusement when I found one at this supposed film set right next to a lake. I guess I missed that episode.

 

 

Likewise I must have missed the episode where a skeletal torso floated on a pond.

 

 And likewise I definitely missed the episode where they made a flimsy shack out of wooden pallets. 

You know what? Let's just say what should be obvious: Anyone who thinks this is where they filmed "In The Flesh" is fucking cooked! This isn't a film set! If you watch "In The Flesh" you'll see that there's not a single scene that takes place in these woods. They just reused some of the props for some kind of scare attraction!

Now, detractors to this idea have often laughed and said "What's a scare attraction?" They ask it rhetorically in a mocking way, as if to suggest that the idea is bullshit, because they've never heard of scare attrations themselves so therefore they must not exist. Be patient, because the urbex community is sadly littered with the sort of people who think that using protection during sex means finding a bus shelter, so these aren't always the sort of folk you turn to for intelligent conversation.

But that's alright. I know scare attractions exist. You know they exist. I've even worked as a scare actor and it was great fun. I got to slather myself in fake blood and wander around being creepy. It was just like my regular life except I was getting paid. 

 

And okay, fair enough that this place does repurpose props from "In The Flesh." I can see how they made the connection. But all anyone has to do is actually watch the damn show to see that no scene in it even remotely resembles this place. And on top of that, a quick google search revealed this lovely, rather conclusive advert on social media, dated 2018.

 

 (Picture not mine, obviously. Credit goes to Scarewoods.)

 

I mean I know a lot of urbexers have the IQ of an Ikea flatpack wardrobe, but how is it 2022 and people still don't know how to use Google?

 

 

So as you can probably see, this is definitely some sort of horror-themed attraction. The stuff here basically forms a linear progression through the woods that would have been taken at night time. It was advertised as being aimed at anyone fifteen or older, but not for the faint hearted, using strobe lights, non-toxic smoke effects and loud bangs, to use sensory stimuli to disorientate the clients. As such it's unfair to judge the scare maze based purely on these images. What we see here is just the bare bones and the leftover stuff, but not the whole immersive experience.

 

With the pathway starting here, I assume there would have been scare actors on these stairs reaching down at those passing through, or something.

 

 

See, it's all very linear. There's a very definite pathway here, around crates and containers that probably would have served some purpose to the experience.

 

 

A quick Google search told me everything about the place. Preparations for the scare attraction started in early to mid 2018, when they started recruiting actors for the event, inviting people to join their army of darkness as demonic forest folk, roaming zombies, monsters, creatures of the night, and creepy clowns. Apparently full training would be given, and it offered work experience for anyone looking to get into costume and make-up design too. Personally I think that this would have looked great on my CV, terrifying people in the name of the Dark Lord, but alas, this will have to wait.

 

 

The social media for the event confirmed that this was in fact the exact same woods, because as the event drew nearer, they started teasing it with images of the props, counting down the days until Halloween. One such picture shows the skeleton and coffin before it was floating in the pond.

 

(Photo not mine. Credit: Scare Wood)

 

They began prompting people to buy tickets in late September 2018, teasing that "Groups of 6-8 enter the woods together... but how many get to leave?"

Honestly it sounds great. I love this sort of thing. Get me a time machine, and I guess I'd also need some sort of parallel universe doohickey, because for some reason, despite all the preparation and hard work, Scare Wood never happened.

On the 9th October they suddenly announced that everyone would be receiving refunds. They released a statement a few days later, saying that the event was cancelled for reasons and situations far beyond their control, but that their desire to develop something special had not gone, and that they hoped to be back for another event in 2019. 

Well that sure is shit.

 

 

 

Eventually the maze path comes across this collection of dead bodys, which are obviously fake but one could imagine how stumbling across these in the dark, while immersed in a spooky atmosphere, could be quite cool, especially if the people walking through here don't get adequate time to really get a good look at them, and their senses are somewhat muddled by strobe lights and smoke. They're still eerie now, propped as they are.

 

 And then there's a section that feels rather 1940s.

 

 

What really spooked me as I came across this downed plane was that at that exact moment, my friend and fellow adventurer Alice messaged me with a photo of it. It turned out that she'd been here only two hours prior to my arrival, and wanted to show me. But the fact that she sent me a photo of the plane while I was standing right in front of it was such a mad coincidence that I actually thought she was somewhere nearby, watching and teasing me, and I stopped what I was doing to look for her. But alas, my reunion with Alice would have to wait. She wasn't here at all. We just have a weird Shining thing going on, apparently.

The plane is decorated with "Flamin' Mamie," which was the title of a song from 1925. But in this case, it's actually based on a specific bomber that had the nickname and decorative artwork in the 1940s.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

That's pretty cool.

 

 

I do wonder, given the wartime vibe of the area, if Nazi Zombies would have been a thing. Gotta love Nazi Zombies.

 

 Nearby are also these ladders leading up to raised platforms that had big buckets on them.

 

A quick Google of "Billis Bath Club" revealed that these wooden contraptions are stage props from the 1949 musical "South Pacific." Nothing in the 1958 movie version resembles this bucket/platform contraption, but I did find a shot from a stage version that shows this exact thing.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

I guess using Urbexer logic, this means the stage production of "South Pacific" took place in these woods too. But to anyone whose brain isn't just ornamental, it would seem that the organisers of Scare Wood obtained the old props, just as they did with "In The Flesh."

But what's really awesome is that someone else, far more eagle-eyed than me, pointed out that not only are these buckets on platforms stage props from Sputh Pacific, but so is the plane! Check it out!

(Picture not mine, obviously)

It's not the best angle, but you can clearly tell from the shape of the cockpit that it is the same plane, and it even has Flamin Mamie painted on it too. This is the exact same plane, albeit now it's a tad more damaged. But how cool is that?

 

However, I highly doubt that South Pacific decorated the prop with this vintage-looking advert for zombie repellant. This was no doubt added later, and it gives the entire thing a very wartime zombie-apocalypse vibe. But for some reason it also reminds me of Bioshock, what with the vintage-style adverts selling us science fiction products. If you do know Bioshock then you definitely know that this is where the similarities end though.

 

There's a half-open coffin poking out of the ground, which is a nice touch.

 

 

This grave makes mention of the fictional Welsh village of Llanllewyn, which is where the Welsh childrens TV show "Porc Peis Bach" takes place. The show is spoken almost entirely in Cymraeg, of which I know very little, and I've not been able to find any full episodes online, so I have no screenshots for comparison.

 

 

The crocodile is in a sorry state, but on the events social media, I was able to find a picture of it before it was destroyed.

 

(Photo credit: Scare Wood)

 

 Evidently someone has smashed it up a bit. What a cunt. 

 

 

Scratched onto this board are the words "Trespassers will be eaten," which is a nice touch but looks like it was done after the place was abandoned. It's definitely not an original feature. I think the organisers of the scare maze would have put more effort into it. This has been scratched on with someones keys or something.

 

 

The graves get a bit more diverse towards the back. Here the zombie show graves show up a bit less frequently. But all of these were probably taken from various other shows. Some of them are in Chinese. 

Unfortunately, given that these are often background props and often don't represent actual characters, Googling the names doesn't really bring up many useful results. 

 

 

It's interesting to see the graves in disrepair though, because at a glance, or when they're in the background of a TV show, they DO look real. But here we can see the illusion slipping away.

 

 

This particular spot was used for many of the adverts for the attraction on their social media, as they counted down the days to Halloween. I was quite happy to see that the window isn't actually damaged by vandals. That pane of glass has always been missing from it. That makes a nice change, especially given the fate of the poor crocodile.

 

Now this particular grave is probably the most notable one here. So far the graves have all been props from rather obscure shows, but this one is actually from Peaky Blinders. It's the grave of Harold Hancox, the Digbeth Kid, who met his end in a pretty gruesome prison throat-gashing scene. It was actually really sad.

Given that Peaky Blinders does have its fair share of cemetery scenes, it wouldn't surprise me if many more of the graves here are from that show too. The season in which the Digbeth Kid died did come out around the same time as "In the Flesh" so it makes sense that whoever was given the task of obtaining props managed to get graves from both shows.

 

So using urbexer logic, this is the Peaky Blinders film set too! It's actually pretty bonkers that someone was able to link this location to an obscure show like "In The Flesh" by noticing similarities in graves, but totally missed the ones from a much more successful and popular show. Think of the clickbait they could have had if they had seen this grave first. 

Alas, one urbex spot that actually was used to film Peaky Blinders went up in flames recently following an arson attack, so it's nice that the urbex world still has something from that show, even if it is the grave prop of a rather obscure character.

 

 

This grave is unreadable. 

 

 

There's a lot of windows around this bit.

 

 

There's this big fake stained glass window, but it looks like the words underneath the figures, as well as their faces, have been deliberately obscured. 

 

 

Some of the larger graves had been tipped over, and the coffin on top of one had been smashed. It's a little bit annoying, but that's what happens when the location of an abandoned scare maze gets handed out to a thousand people in a livestream.

 

 

No doubt all of this is from a TV show too, but I haven't a clue which one. Let's be honest, they're fairly generic graves.

 

 

There's a war memorial here that's been taken apart, but not broken. It looks like it comes apart to be assembled on set. 

 

 

The memorial makes mention of The Great War, which is what they called World War One before they knew it was going to have a sequel. So this is probably from another show that takes place in the past.

 

 

I think these graves are partially written in Hebrew, and they have the Jewish star of David on them. They're a completely different style to the other graves, and also made of different material, so it's safe to say these are from a completely different show too.

 

 

You'd think a name like "Clementine Lander" would have some Google presence, but mostly all that comes up is the moon landing. Somehow I doubt this is the gravestone of the Apollo moon lander. It does kinda bug me a bit. If only I knew someone who could translate Hebrew.

 

 

No idea what all this is doing here. Some casual flytipping, maybe.

 

 

 

And then there's this weird little back passage, which seems to run alongside the scare maze but doesn't really connect to it. Presumably this was a means for the staff to cross the length of the site easily in case they were needed or something went wrong, or maybe even just for one scare actor to reappear elsewhere in the maze once the group had passed them by.

 

 

It's interesting that they incorporated some of the zombie graves into the fence.

 

 

Finally exiting the scare maze, there's a little area at the top of the woods that seems a bit more chilled and lighthearted, and has a bit more of a campsite vibe.

 

 

This part of the woods was apparently more family friendly, and would have been open to the public before dark, before the scare maze opened. There would have been spooky stories, pumpkin carving, face painting, snacks and a pantomime. It actually sounds quite appealing. People could chill out, get fat, have fun, and then as soon as the sun sets and the children go home, they head for the scare maze and hope that their new excess snack belly doesn't affect their ability to run from the zombie horde.

 

 

There's this really cool boat chariot thing here, with flat tyres. I would love to ride around in this.  

And you know what? Someone has pointed out to me that this is also a stage prop from South Pacific. Here it is next to the plane.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

How cool is that? I love that some of the props in these woods have actually been on stage and been seen by thousands before ending up here.

 

 

There's a few signs dotted around, saying "Mister Maker Makes" and "Splash Science," which presumably would have been for some child-friendly activities that were intended to take place here. At least, that'st he impression I get, especially when a sign is literally named after a popular childrens TV show. 

I still can't believe some people looked at this and concluded that it was a film set for "In The Flesh." What, did the extras relax with "splash science" in between takes? Fucking Hell.

 

 

Looks like there was some sort of Houdini themed activity here. 

 

 

There's a sign post here which lists various cities and the air miles to them. I have no idea what this could have been used for, but it's lying on its side in a shack instead of being out on display, so maybe it was obtained with some of the other props but they couldn't put a use to it. I don't know. 

 

So that's it for the Scare Maze. A million people have been here in the year since I visited, and in every set of photos that appears on the internet, somethings changed, been stolen, or broken, and there are a load of new social media stickers advertising someones page because after all, what I definitely want to do after I go somewhere and see it with my own eyes is go home and watch a blurry video of the exact same place, but with a new chavvy voiceover saying "Olright Laaa today we is in this film set innit."

To conclude, if you do fancy going here, then it's fairly easy to access. It's just a stroll in the woods, after all. Bring some beer. Bring your girlfriend. Bring your boyfriend. Don't bring them both at the same time! That will just be awkward. 

As someone who loves scare attractions, I'm both intrigued and saddened to see a scare maze that never was. Had things gone differently, this could have been amazing. Now we'll never know.

It sure is weird that it was all left behind though. I mean, a lot of time and effort went into this place, and they didn't just bundle it all backup into a van when they found out they couldn't do the event? That makes absolutely no sense, especially given that most of the props are from TV shows. That should give them some sort of value to their rightful owners, right?

I did reach out to the big cheese of the whole thing, to hear his side of the story and find out just what happened here. I never had a response.

So this is all I've got.

 

If you recognise any of the props from their sources, I would love to hear about it, because I am truly stumped. My next post will be an abandoned house, and then I'll be doing a snack-sized military thing. Definitely looking forward to that! In the meantime, follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Vero and Reddit. Follow me on Facebook if you absolutely must, but Facebook have fucked over pages recently, so I am less active there.

 

Thanks for reading!