Location: 7759 S Harlem Ave
Other people will have to help me out here, because I can't remember when Haunted Trails opened, and what I do remember may be a little hazy. All I remember from the 1970s are the miniature golf course and batting cages. On rare occasions -- very rare occasions (maybe two or three times?) -- my parents took me and my brother to Haunted Trails to play miniature golf. There was something surreal about going there at night, the way it could be pitch-black out while the golf course was illuminated like a movie set. I never chipped any of the golf balls into traffic, but this was a pretty common occurrence. (In grade school, I was a fat kid, and pretty unathletic to boot, so I avoided the batting cages altogether.) By high school, Haunted Trails became part of the official dating circuit: you could go to a movie at Ford City or Chicago Ridge Mall, or you could go to Haunted Trails.
It wasn't until 1982 that I began frequenting Haunted Trails with a degree of obsession that I probably haven't experienced since. I'd recently been dumped by my girlfriend, so my friend Joe and I started paying the arcade at Haunted Trails daily -- sometimes twice-daily -- visits. I bought tokens by the fistfuls, and then Joe and I would wander around, staking claim to our favorite games.
The first video game I ever played was Pong in 1980, which you hooked up to your TV: It was a black and white image of a ball going from one side of the TV screen to the other. Each person had a paddle, and your sole objective was to make sure that the ball didn't get past you. The only adjustment that you could make was how fast the ball would go. The second game I played was Frogger in 1981; I played it in a grocery store in either Normal or Champaign.
Haunted Trails, however, was my first legitimate arcade. I loved the electronic noises. I loved the the sound of tokens filling the tray of the coin machine. And even though I was going through a period of pathological shyness, I loved the girls who'd come in and sometimes flirt.
I'm sure I played Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, but our favorites were Tron and Pengo. Tron, especially. I'm sure Joe and I weren't the best Tron players at Haunted Trails, but we were certainly in the top rung, and there were days when we were playing the upper levels that a small crowd would gather behind us to watch. I was skinny in high school (but still unathletic) and wore a Members Only jacket (actually, it was a Members Only knockoff), and I bought my clothes at Chess King in Chicago Ridge Mall, and I felt that I was on the cutting edge of...something. I wasn't sure what, though.
I never got into Skee Ball at Haunted Trails, and the couple of times I returned there after high school, the place had expanded too much for my tastes. One thing I've noticed is that when you meet people from other parts of Chicago who have never heard of Burbank and have no idea where it is (and, believe me, there are millions of such people), there's still a pretty good chance that they'll have heard of, or remember seeing, Haunted Trails. It may be Burbank's most enduring landmark.
Memories, anyone?
24 comments:
If your parents threw you Haunted Trails birthday party, you were elevated to god-status. What, everybody gets tokens? Pizza?? A round of mini-golf? Baseball cages? This is the life!
But we all went to St. Albert the Great so our standards were pretty low.
I worked hard at skee ball and pop the mole to win a couple thousand tickets so I could snag a sweet portable tape player with headphones. It practically broke on the way home.
Does anyone remember what haunted trails was called before it was haunted trails? I remember going there as a little girl, and i remember playing miniture golf,and I remember it was all re-done and turned into haunted trails.
My brother & I would bicycle down 79th St to Haunted Trails w/our baseball bats for the batting cage.
I also liked playing Pac man and trying to score the little trinkets.
I honestly don't think I ever played miniature golf at Haunted Trails, though I do remember hitting the arcade. Tron was my favorite game to play there, and I was pretty good, though I am sure not as good as you were John!! ;)
Btw: I sent the link to this blog to all my friends and family, I knew they'd get a kick out of it as much as I am!
Sherry
My brother had a birthday party there and he got to go into the money machine. My favorite game was called Big Bertha you had to throw balls into her mouth while her dress flew up and she yelled "FEED ME".
The hardest part (or the funnest) of mini golf was trying not to lose your club or one of your friends in the blue or red water.
I now live in Arizona and I must say there isn't a place like Haunted Trails anywhere. Ahh GOOD TIMES!!
Does anybody remember their sister company Western Trails?
AHH.. Hunted trails. I remember when it first opened. The building where you get the putter for golf was the arcade. It had a 70s style mini golf course and 2 or 3 batting cages. The games consisted mostly of pin-ball machines, air hockey, and mechanical games like Batter up. It was set up like pin ball but it pitched a silver ball out of the center and you tried to hit the ball into holes to get runs. It also had a shooting gallery in the back where you made animals screem and tin cans jump. The building that has the skee ball was originally a Denny’s restaurant. The name was either “Happy Trails” or “Fun time Square”. It had a clown at the top of the sign instead of a monster. When the Denny’s restaurant went under, Happy Trails bought it and changed the name to Hunted Trails. They changed the thyme of the park to horror and even rented and sold costumes at Halloween (the costume department eventually became Bill’s Trick Shop). The old days of playing Missile Command, Space Invaders, and Tempest were over. Now you could clime inside and racecar game and feel like you were really driving in a race. It was great times and I still like to stop back every year for the annual haunted house at Halloween.
Theo
So many fond memories of "Frankie's" when we were kids in the early 80's. We called Haunted Trails Frankie's because of the huge Frankenstein in front of the building. We didn't get to go very often but every time we would pass by our eyes would bulge out of our heads and we would crane our necks just to see it for that extra second. We have all grown up and I still live in Burbank. My children now go there and have so much fun. It's great to see things for the first time again through their eyes. Some things have changed throughout the years but every time I walk in there I feel 7 again, the lights, the smells, and the sounds haven't changed.
I remember picking up lost multicolored golf balls behind the chain link fence, in the back lot of the drive-in next door. Also the creepy ghost garbage cans that always had bees around.
45 gold arcade tokens for $5 back in the 80's. Q-Bert and Dragon's Lair and Journey Escape. Plush fuzzy dice for skee-ball tickets.
I forgot about Bill's Trick Shop! There was a big deal about stretched soda bottles. It was easy to entertain us back in the 80's.
I do remember begging my parents to take my brother and I there whenever we drove past the place as a kid
I did have a haunted trails birthday once when I was a kid. Though having a November birthday it was not quite as cool as the summer time ones when you could go to the batting cages and play miniature golf too.
I also remember saving up all my tickets for all that great useless crap.
Ah those were the days.
I don't even think I went to Haunted Trails as a kid. I believe my first time was on a date. I do remember passing it quite often in my younger days, but at that time it was only miniature golf and batting cages. NOW, on the other hand, not only is it mini golf, but also a mini vacation. You have a restaurant, a birthday party room and an ice cream hut. The video arcade to the right of the parking lot and the game room that spits out tickets for silly little trinkets on the left of the parking lot, with the go carts and batting cages dead center of the two. Speaking of tickets, I still have hundreds of them to cash in for my prizes. Thank God they never expire!
I was never really into Haunted Trails in my youth, but did go a few times in my teens (late 80s/early 90s). Minigolf is always fun. It is a rite of passage.
Ohh Haunted trails
I lived a few blocks from that there. In grade school we would meet up there and then go wreak havock as only pre-teens could do. I too was addicted to skee ball and I pretty much mastered Mortal Kombat when it first came out. My brother worked in the haunted house. Ridiculous! The blue water has toxic but magical powers.
I worked as a J.A.G. (Junior Arcade Guy)there for my first job in the summer of '84. This, after I made the decision not to play Junior-Varsity Baseball for The Czar. Made $3 an hour to start. After a couple months I gathered up the nerve to ask Rich, the owner, for a raise. Whoo-hoo, I was making $3.50 an hour!!!
The cast of characters in that place is unmatched in anything I have encountered since. John, I'm sure you knew alot of these guys. Their names and faces now slipping slowly from our slowly enfeebled minds. Those that had anything on the ball (pun intended) got outta there quick. Those that didn't? Eeew, remember those guys that were like twenty-three or twenty-four and still hung around the arcade? Ugh, I need to take a shower now...
One thing though, I remember the SAHS Girls who used to come through there. Now, looking back, some of the finer and more diabolical ones were viewed as if they were international celebrities. Untouchable cuz us Reavis and Laurence Boys never seemed to grasp their language. Looked upon as more worldly and 'older' though we all were the same age. It was as if they were from 'The City' but they weren't. Just plain weird.
I could probably still name names, and fer sure the statute of limitations has run out by now on all the stuff we had our hands into at that time. But a glorious time it was none the less.
I didnt grow up in the area, but sometime around 1999-2000 my girlfriend at the time & I were driving aimlessly around Chicagoland and passed this place up. We were so amazed that a place this awesome even existed that we vowed to return to play mini golf the next weekend. Best mini golf course ever. I hope its still there.
Oh yea, Haunted trails, and I do remember Western trails...wasn't it on Cicero by Zayre?
I also remember Safari trails, not sure where it was, but for some reason I am thinking 95th street. I only went there once, went to Western trails maybe 2 times...and Haunted trails more than I can remember.
When it was cold...and I was older, we could go up to Chicago Ridge Mall and go to that arcade...listen to them play Bon Jovi songs, and play videogames in there...and see who showed up that time. :)
Ahhh...the memories.
Ah, Haunted Trails! I could rattle off more memories about this place than you'd care to hear, since I spent the later part of my high school years prowling the place at least a couple times a month.
My favorite Haunted Trails story, however, involves the arcade. When my boyfriend and I first got together, (back in 1997, which I have a hard time believing) we would always end up at the Haunted Trails arcade after we'd exhausted all other possibilities for entertainment. Mike was (and is) pretty skilled at most of the fighter games, so he would try to see how far he could get in single player mode on Tekken 3 or Marvel vs. Capcom, using only the two quarters required to initiate the game. I mostly stuck with pinball, because I didn't have video games growing up, and never developed the hand-eye coordination required to last more than three seconds.
So we'd separate to play our respective games and once I'd blown the five or ten dollars I'd allotted on the games I liked, I'd join Mike to see how he was doing. Any time the place was crowded, he'd often be forced to abort his single-player status...guys would see the vacant joystick at the opposite end of the console, and feel compelled to set up and challenge him to a two-player dual. I always saw this as a ridiculous way to assert alpha male status, and took a great sense of pride in the fact that Mike, more often than not, sent them packing in minutes, not because he's the sort of guy who needs to prove his manhood, but because he was just way better than they were.
There was one time, though, when this did not happen. Mike was at the final boss (Onslaught) level in Marvel Vs. Capcom, just a few hits away from beating the game, when some jackass, without even asking, dumped his quarters in the slot, which automatically stopped the game and switched it over to two-player mode. I distinctly remember feeling very indignant as I watched the game start over, and when the guy beat Mike, felt he had been dealt a great injustice.
So I did something a little uncharacteristic. "I wanna play." I announced, and produced my two quarters. I went through the character selection process (each player gets two fighters, who take turns battling at your command until their energy bars run out), decided on Gambit and War Machine as my avatars, and assumed the position at the joystick. I'd played this game a couple times before, both by myself, and against Mike, and I had absolutely no sense of strategy or technique. I just wiggled the joystick around and mashed the buttons until something dramatic happened.
This was my approach in this instance as well, and somehow it allowed me to use War Machine's super special power move, where he pulls out a hand cannon and blasts his opponent in a way that's nearly impossible to block. This kept happening, and I made short work of the asshole who ruined Mike's game, properly avenging the aborted Onslaught battle. I would have been content to leave it at that, but then another boy stepped up, probably convinced that my win had been a fluke, and eager to put this nice quiet girl back in her place.
I proceeded to whip his ass as well, and the asses of at least two more boys who tried to do the same. When I did inevitably lose to someone, I was so exhilarated I didn't even care, because I knew I had performed far beyond my own expectations.
Mike and I had a running joke after that about how we should have been taking bets throughout my winning streak, so that I could tell people I hustled all those boys.
I was able to duplicate that success the next couple times we visited Haunted Trails, but nothing compares to that first string of wins. The looks on those boys' faces when they realized they'd just been owned by a girl, and even worse, a girl who openly admitted she'd never really played before, were so priceless I don't really mind that I don't have them recorded for posterity.
Haunted trails was one of my favorite hangouts when I was growing up along with Ford city. I like Haunted so much that I worked there for a short period of time in the mid 80's until 1986 until I got fired. Currently I'm the General Manager at Haunted Trails and have worked there for the second time around since 1994. Man this site brings back some cool memories. And I also went to Kennedy Grade School and kinda remember a talent show that a certain someone did a skit from a Steve Martin act. It was very good and funny. If I'm not mistaken It could have been John McNally. Maybe/Maybe not. Thanks for the memories John.
I'll confess: I was the one who did the Steve Martin act in the talent show. Mrs. Richards, the art teacher, organized it. I took second place; I lost to the two disco dancers. For those of you from Kennedy, Mrs. Richards is still alive and doing well. She started sending me Christmas cards a few years ago.
8 tokens for $1 on Sundays I remember - 45 tokens for $5. They used to have like 20 pac man machines (maybe more) during the height of that game. The album by Buckner and Garcia called "Pacman Fever" actually had patterns to the game on the album's sleeve cover!
A friend and I used to go early on Sunday mornings with $1 and play for like 4-5 hours because we memorized those patterns!
I remember when I was little I was trying to get the ball up the ramp that was set up under the Frankenstein. I hit it twice and it didn't make it up the ramp, so the third time I hit it so hard that it went over the fence, bounced across Harlem, and ended up in the trailer park that used to be across the street.
what about Irv's fun stand on cicero where wal mart is now? we used to drive golf balls at the cars going by on cicero!
i remember going past this place all the time, but my parents would never take us there because my brother was terrified of frankenstien!
it's been about 18 years since i have lived in burbank... is genaro's drug store still around? i also remember going into the ace hardware store with my dad all the time to pay the electric bill and they would give you light bulbs... sometimes my mom would send me down there to pay the bill if it was due and my dad had forgotten to do it. i was like 10 years old and i would prepare for these epic trips... steal all the change i could to get candy from the store across the street from genaro's (i think there was an allstate office next to it)
my family really went for cheap entertainment, like going to watch the planes take off from midway airport... i'm wondering if anyone else's parents did this? i remember as a kid sitting on top of my mom and dad's van watching the planes take off and having a contest with my brother to see if we could find the plane with mike ditka's face on it (i think it was a southwest plane?!?) i know it sounds kind of lame, but then again, my parents did spend all thier money on our tuition to st. albert's (though i still believe wasted because some teachers there did not know how to teach, but did know how to eat large amount of cookies and point out how your family was different from everyone else's in an embarassing way [grr... many hurt feelings here])
i have so many memories of this town, i was wondering why you hadn't mentioned jr's hotdogs? went there as a kid all the time too!
Haunted Trails had the coolest animatronic shooting gallery back in the early 80's. The haunted props would move or make a sound when you hit the targets. The only other gallery of its type was at Great America, and it was dismantled several years ago.
They used to have a lot more haunted props inside. They once had a prop of a witch rising out of a cauldron. They projected a live-action actor's face onto the figure's head, so it appeared that the witch was watching you and talking to you as you walked by. I must have stood there for 20 minutes watching her and listening to her witchy voice and accompanying sound effects. Pretty advanced FX for the time.
They used to rent costumes year-round, and you could also rent Charmin' Charley, the animatronic skeleton who played the piano.
Great days.
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