The winners of the Readers’ Choice Awards for the top destinations for Halloween

The spooky season is in full swing and there are so many fun ways to celebrate, from carving pumpkins to trick-or-treating to facing your fears at haunted houses. With all the options out there, how do you find the top destinations for all things Halloween-related? The 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards are here to help.

• USAToday 10Best asked experts to nominate their favorite places to go and things to do in seven categories.
• Readers then vote on their top picks and that’s how the winners are chosen.

These are the best things to see and do in October for Halloween fun:

• Best Escape Room – Enchambered in Sacramento, California. They operate four different escape rooms, including Containment Breach, where players try to solve the mystery of a locked lab where an experiment went terribly wrong, and Trouble in the Toy Shop, a less intense escape room where Patches the toy bear needs help making and delivering toys.
• Best Ghost Tour – Mysteries of Hawaii in Oahu, Hawaii. It offers four different walking tours, including a Ghosts of Old Honolulu Tour and the Waikiki Night Marchers.
• Best Haunted Destination – Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. The collectibles inside reportedly come from haunted destinations across the country and they’re displayed in a 1938 property that’s believed to be haunted.
• Best Haunted Hotel – Fainting Goat Island Inn in Nichols, New York. At this former railroad hotel built in the late 1800s, guests have reported eerie encounters, like hearing footsteps on a staircase that doesn’t exist and being woken in the night by spooky voices.
• Best Haunted House / Attraction – Cutting Edge Haunted House in Fort Worth, Texas. Located in a 100-year-old abandoned meatpacking plant, it offers visitors a 55-minute haunted experience with live actors, special effects and frights around every twisting corridor.
• Best Pumpkin Patch – Treworgy Family Orchards in Levant, Maine. Put your comfy walking shoes on before you check out the eight-miles of rows of pumpkins, or take a hayride or a horse-drawn farm tour.
• Best Theme Park Halloween Event – Howl-O-Scream at SeaWorld. Visitors to the annual event can enjoy a collection of elaborate haunted houses, darkened thrill rides, immersive scare zones, as well as “darkly entertaining” live shows.

Source: USA Today