Frequently Asked Questions

Phobia Rides is a "company" created by two cousins who love amusement rides and horror. we make homemade amusement attractions for friends and family to enjoy. This is basically just a hobby we have that we let other people enjoy by going on our attractions.

We are currently aiming for Halloween 2025. We do have to take a gap year in 2024 due to multiple circumstances but will try to use that time to work on the 2025 attraction (research, planning, digital design). Typically the first thing I come up with is an idea for the ride system, and normally I would not tell people this early, but hey, realistically nobody is reading this. So the plan for the 2025 ride system is a combination of a dark ride and motion simulator. Riders would board a single person dark ride vehicle and would start their journey traveling through a short dark ride section before eventually their dark ride vehicle positions itself on top of a custom-built motion platform. The riders would then experience motion and other effects syned to a custom made ride video. Once the motion platform part of the ride is over, the dark ride vehicle will reverse, disembarking the motion platform and moving through the same dark ride section in reverse, this time with different effects and possibly a different looking environment until they make their way back to the station. The reason I want to go with a system like this is firstly because I've always wanted to build a motion simulator and also I find the idea of a dark ride vehicle boarding and parking itself on a motion simulator really cool. It would be a pretty big engineering challenge and a lot of work but hopefully it can work with my schedule. This however, might be the final phobiarides attraction since I would be finished school by this point and need to get a full time job which would obviously make it almost impossible to work on these attractions with such limited free time especially since I always want to out-do the previous attraction. Ok, Ill leave it at that, if you actually read all this than wow! thanks!

Due to very limited space, we often repurpose our old attractions. When a new attraction comes out you may not have a lot of time to check it out before it closes. This also acts as a cost saving measure as we can re-use parts from previous attractions.

At Phobia Rides we never charge admission for our attractions for a number of reasons. Instead we may offer you upgrades to your experience such as on-ride photos. Purchasing these additional items helps to support these projects which cost thousands of dollars to create. Of course, if you are a big fan of these attractions and want us to keep making more, donations are highly appreciated!

Firstly to ensure availability, make sure to contact us. You should just be able to show up but we can't guarantee availability unless it's an event day such as halloween. Unfortunately for safety and security reasons only close family and friends are permitted to come in person.

We tend to release our attractions for Halloween. Of course the best way to stay up to date is to follow our instagram page (@phobiarides) Sometimes we will open a little before halloween such as the weekend before and will usually run the attraction for up to a month after release so those who couldn't experience it during the halloween season can still get the opportunity to experience the attraction!

Don't worry about it :) Nah but in all seriousness, safety is very important to us! We strive to create the safest possible attractions, starting with the inital design. When designing an attraction we want to push ourselves to create something crazy and exciting but have to focus on safety. Thats why you won't see us building 100 foot tall roller coasters but rather a slow moving dark ride vehicle with very little that could go wrong in the first place. We try to focus on getting the thrill with horror elements, suspense, and jumpscares rather than an intimidating looking ride system. When it comes to control systems, we also focus on safety and build overcomplicated control systems that have way more sensors and safety features than is realistically required. In addition, all our attractions feature security cameras with an operator watching the ride at all times. Emergency stops can be triggered automatically based on faults or unusual sensor activity in addition to multiple manual Emergency stop buttons. As a past ride operator at a major theme park I've spent a lot of time learning how to safety operate flat rides and roller coasters and how their control systems work. I've tried to impliment as much of these safety features into our rides and also focus on operating our attractions as if they were located at a real theme park. It's also worth noting I have experience in the commercial fire alarm industry and have put quite a bit of thought into fire safety, all our show buildings feature fire alarm systems, emergency lighting, fire extinguishers and evacuation plans. Our attractions are all built to be fail safe upon power failure to allow for a safe stopping position and easy evacuation. Because of all this, we are proud of our essentially perfect safety record with no serious injuries in all our 4 years of operation. Again, all this is super overkill for these low speed, low intensity, low risk attractions but it's just something I like doing and find designing for safety interesting.