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Drayton Manor needed a Haunted Ride. However, they also wanted to do something different to the bog-standard well-themed ghost train. And different they did. They installed a Vekoma Mad House, a new ride based on a rather old idea. However, what Drayton really went to town with was the theming ideas.

A haunted vicarige, very nice. Mist filled gardens with doors and the like bursting into life every so often. The garden has a very short organ loop which can get irritiating considereing that the wait in the garden can be very long. It all looks very nice. In the corner of the house, a portacabin with a logo on the side very similar to Ghost Busters. What could this be?

Every 15 minutes some public get to find out, as the door is opened and a small number of people let in. As we file through the cramped portacabin, we pass staff working on very 80's looking computers. This is IBN when it was popular. Several televisions may burst into life at this point and feature "Dr X" giving you your mission details. More recently, the video has not been in effect, and instead the story is "set" in the space of 10 seconds by the operator shouting "We are here to see what happened to the last investigative team". This really isn't ideal, as it doesn't let you know the bits that you need to understand to "get" the rest of the ride.

The real story, as revealed by the first pre-show video is that this paranormal investigative team have been called to investigate strange disturbances. Unfortuantly contact was lost with the first team, and your mission is to find out what has happened to them. The story is genuinely creepy, a modern horror story almost. You leave the portacabin into the basement of the house, with some creepy music playing. The music is artificial, but it fits the situation really well, sound more then similar to the X-Files background music. The basement coridoor is incredibly narrow, and you file through one by one - as you queue in this coridoor you are told by the op that from now on you should keep your eyes and ears open, you are in uncharted territory. Almost as soon as he says this, by extraordinary coincidence, something odd suddenly looms at you from the cieling.

I say "looms", in fact all the subtlety of the start of the ride is lost with this one awful effect. Some plastic skeletons descend towards you, but still way out of reach. Despite this paranormal discovery, the op couldn't care less and leads you through to a library. You see a picture of an old man amongst the books. The person in the painting appears to be the reverend from the vicarage before it became possesed. The op says he needs you to stand away from the walls. He doesn't give a reason, it just needs to be done. Again, paranormal expiriences have an uncanny tendency to start as soon as everyone has done what the op says. Just at that moment, the room darkens, and the painting of the old man fades to reveal.... a very plastic looking head that bears absolutely no resemblence to what the picture showed before this "morph" occurred.

The painting with lip synching that doesn't match the sound of the voice, and with a head that twists far too far around, excorcist style, tells you a little about the history of the Vicarage, it was taken over by the forces of evil. Again, this is a very creepy story - this is like being in a horror movie, nothing to do with ghosts, everything to do with satanic forces. There comes, in my opinion, a plot twist that simply doesn't make sense. Despite the picture being a religious leader who is there to fight the forces of evil, he doesn't care about getting you out safe, and merely joins the forces of evil by laughing at the fact that you can't get out. I never did understand why a power of good would be encouraging you to go further into the power of evil and not trying to get you to leave.

More words lead to the revelation of what happened to the previous as a stunning effect melts the cieling of the room away to reveal the previous team floating above your head, possibly dead, certainly overcome by the power of the dark side. As the painting blurbs on more about the dark side and how you can't go back, you must go forward (which is repeated about 10 times) lights start to flash beneath the floor, and the whole rooms starts to shake, with the floor tilting and wobbling in all directions. This is another very good effect and would genuinely scare me had some of the effects before it not ruined the storyline.

With more shouting of "You can't go back, you must go on" the painting dissapears, and the op being a paranormal investigator seems to know exactly what should be done and which doors we should go through. Thanks goodness these investigators are trained up well eh!

The doors lead us into small corridoors, which in turn lead us "outside" of the house into the graveyard. Here is another slight storyline issue, the haunted swing is set outdoors, but obviously has to be inside for the room to rotate. Before we can ponder on where we are, the leader suddenly deserts us. Perhaps that training wasn't so high after all! Never mind, some thunder and lightning cracks as the forces of evil surround us, and a skull on a gravestone in front of us opens it's eyes, and in the same voice as the painting, tells us that evil is overcoming us. The lights go out, and when they come back, the room seems to be at an alarming angle. Some odd forces make us feel like we are moving, but nothing is seem to be moving, a good idea for a story that wants to portray your soul being taken by the dark side. Suddenly, as evil so regularly does, nothing seems to make sense - our surroundings start to move as we feel forces that we shouldn't be feeling.

Cutting through this mixture of sensory overload, a voice over a radio from the the paranormal team tells us that they are detecting some odd goings on (we could have told them that) and they are trying to get it under control. As our surrounding flips compeltely around us, we see graves that were underneath us spin around our heads - this is no normal world. Suddenly, the world settles down, the paranormal team must have been succesfull. Indeed, they were, as a voice tells us to get away form the area quickly. Through more doors and coriddors before being spat out of the house.

And that's it.

No more story, no ending.

First things first, it really is one for the best ideas for a storyline that UK dark rides have. This isn't a ghost train, where ghosts are obviously fake. In fact, you could say there are no ghosts or such like in this ride at all, as long as you ignore the skeletons near the start. This is more like a horror movie - with the forces of evil having taken over a house. It's great, and it is full ov movie cliche's, such as the paranormal investigative team, Dr X and the floating team before you.

The problem is that some of the effects on the ride simply are not good enough to hold the storyline. There are some great effects - the floating team, the banging floor, and the swing itself are really good and suit the story. However, the skeletons and the talking painting seem to be designed by someone thinking that this was a normal ghost train, covered in ultra-violet paint and looking decidedly tacky. The operators also contribute to ruining the story. The way the ride is presented requires them to act. They don't, and this ruins the sense of being totally immeresed in the story; it is impossible to feel you are in a real situation when you have the op chatting up girls all the way through the preshows.

There is no ending which is a shame, but could be gotten away with if what was there was perfect.

A problem you may encounter is the under-staffing that is carried out, meaning that letting people through is painfully slow. Every 15 minutes on a busy day is attrocious. When it opened, the ride reportedly had real actors doing the leading round, and I can imagine that this created a wonderful atmosphere. But a cocky 18 year old slouching around spoils the broth.

The potential is there, and it should be reccomended to all dark ride fans purely because the story is so unique.

2004:

Drayton Manor have tweaked the storyline for 2004. For a start, instead of the good Reverend in the house, we now have a Vampire - still claiming to be the reverend. Blimey - the head of the parish council should be shot for letting that one slip through! He looks more believable then the luminous-paint clad face of his predecessor, though it is hard to hear what the new guy is saying. Room effects such as the ceiling and floor remain.

In the chamber (sorry, graveyard, sorry, crypt) itself, the monument in the middle has now been replaced with a small tomb - which looks stunningly like an old ice-cream cart painted in grey...

As the cycle comes to an end, the lid slides open and as riders draw breath expecting some huge monstorsity to burst out, we get a little bat the size of a human hand. After a while the lights turn out and we hear some bat noises. The lights come on again, and we leave. Whilst any change in a ride is nice, I am not sure what the point of these changes were. To be honest, the new face in the house doesn't change anything much, and as for the new story in the chamber...

It has potential now to become a cult classic a little like X:\No Way Out - the way a tiny bat appears from the large opening of the tomb is laughable. I can't work out if the park meant for it to be funny or not... but all things considered whilst the new changes haven't made the ride any better, they haven't made it any worse. It is nice to have a change though!