The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Queen Mary scores a new Halloween look
An attraction built on basketball star Shaquille O’neal’s star power offers mazes, rides, games and more
The Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor Halloween event found eternal rest following the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the iconic ship, hotel and museum in Long Beach is home to a new group of monsters, ghouls and all sorts of other creatures of the night, which are ready celebrate the spooky season.
Shaqtoberfest, a new Halloween event conjured up by basketball superstar Shaquille O’neal along with event companies Thirteenth Floor Entertainment Group and ABG Entertainment, opened last weekend in front of the Queen Mary, a world famous hot spot for ghost hunting.
While Dark Harbor was more about scaring the souls out of patrons, Shaqtoberfest has a different Halloween vision.
“This is just basically a big Halloween party,” said Christopher Stafford, CEO of Thirteenth Floor, on opening weekend as fans went through a handful of mazes, rode carnival rides and partied in front of a DJ blasting dance music on a stage at Shaqtoberfest, which runs some evenings through Oct. 31.
“A lot of the events here in Southern California focus on scares and just haunted houses,” Stafford continued. “But what we wanted to throw was a party that also gives people the opportunity to get their scare on.”
Of course, O’neal himself was at the opening event, showing off his basketball skills and even going through a few of the mazes with fans.
Shaq dunking heads
Dressed in all black and standing head and shoulders above a crowd that surrounded him, O’neal entertained with his skills at the Dead Head Hoop Games on Saturday evening. Just as the name implies, the game is tossing human heads — fake ones, of course — into plastic buckets.
O’neal was busting out hook shots and trick shots behind his back, but since the Hall of Famer’s curse has always been his poor free throw skills, actual baskets were few and far between. So, instead O’neal dropped a $20 bill on the ground and invited kids to try to make a shot for the money.
But, they missed too. After the hoops, the crowd followed the star as he headed into one of the haunts with his entourage. He then did a walk through the VIP area before jumping on a golf cart and leaving his monsters behind to handle the Shaqtoberfest crowds.
Halloween party favors
For a decade, the Queen Mary hosted its widely popular Dark Harbor event, which typically attracted more than 140,000 people a year during its monthlong run until its final iteration in 2019. Dark Harbor included walk-thru haunts on and off the ship that were inspired by ghosts actually believed to haunt the vessel.
Those stories, spliced with elements of real life history behind each of the mazes, made the attractions that much scarier as guests would navigate down dark,
SHAQTOBERFEST
When:
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Tickets: metal hallways into the belly of the ship, hunted by a cast of frightening characters.
But Shaqtoberfest has a unique feel and appeal.
“This is very different from Dark Harbor because it doesn’t really lean in hard on haunted houses and mazes; it leans in more on Halloween celebrations,” Stafford said.
“It’s a different approach; it’s a new approach, and I knew that going into it and I knew it may take a little time for people to understand what it was, but once they did they would have a good time.”
The event is anchored by five short mazes throughout the festival grounds.
Those include Diesel’s Pumpkin Patch, a maze made up of walls of hay that includes trick-or-treat trails and bounce houses for kids and adults; Midway Madness, a funhouse-themed maze where mad clowns chase you; and the Lost City Boardwalk, a 1920s-themed city filled with seedy characters.
While Shaqtoberfest isn’t tapping into the ship’s history like Dark Harbor, there are still nautical-themed mazes like Deadman’s Wharf, which is probably the creepiest since it re-creates the inside of a sunken ship that’s been taken over by sea creatures and is filled with undead sailors.
Buccaneers are on the hunt over in Pirate’s Cove, where guests walk through dark alleys and caves to face the ocean outlaws who are impeding escape.
“I wasn’t screaming with fear, but these have all been a lot of fun,” Los Angeles resident Claudia Adler said after going through most of the haunts. “The music, the festival and all of it makes this feel like a party.”
Some of the mazes aren’t fully enclosed, so at various points the guests on the outside can see those walking through and bear witness to the madness, or maybe even warn them about what’s lurking in the shadows.
“We believe people like to watch each other get scared, so we thought it would be cool to create a haunted trail where you can watch the people inside being scared as you’re hanging out,” Stafford said.