Murillo-Ordaz 1

Andrew Murillo-Ordaz
Professor Malvin
English 115
26 October 2015
Ex. 3.2: Autoethnography
While visiting Six Flags Magic Mountain Freight Fest I am able to see hundreds of cars
waiting in a line to reach the parking lot and park all their vehicles. Once you reach the front of
the park where the Six Flags Freight Fest sign is held up you will then see multiple lines of
people waiting to purchase their tickets to enter the park or just waiting to actually enter the park.
After entering the park there are tons of people walking around, running away from the people in
costumes, or heading to a second or third line to either pick up their maze passes or buy their
maze passes. These lines tend to be longer than those outside because of all the people that wait
last minute to buy their passes. Next to this line there is the first maze of the park and the line to
enter the maze was double the size of the line for the passes was. After receiving your pass you
could enter any maze or ride that is open. Each attraction had a wait time of one hour or higher.
When waiting in line for a maze the line moves faster than that of the roller coasters and
everyone is having conversations with each other discussing what they are going to do after
entering and exiting the maze. Once you reach the front of the maze you are able to hear lots of
people, mostly girls, screaming their hearts out hoping to hide from all the monsters. Everyone is
walking around the park trying to reach the next scare zone. There are mostly teens to early
adults walking around heading to all the different mazes. While walking to the next maze you
can encounter multiple people that like to run, chase, and scary the living crap out of their next

Murillo-Ordaz 2
victim. The employs seem to love scaring women and chase them until they enter a new zone or
maze.
This theme park benefits the community it serves by giving everyone a different form of
entertainment. These different forms could be from seeing people get scared, getting scared
themselves, riding the roller coasters, and/or entering the mazes and seeing the different scares
and costumes. This type of entertainment gives off either fear or enjoyment. The objective of
these types of theme parks are to scare their guests visiting the park and hoping that those people
will spend lots of money there and visit the park another time. My expectations of this park was
to be scary enough to frighten me, but I was rarely scared of entering the mazes first or having
people pop out of nowhere. I did get surprised twice by a zombie girl who was waiting for me to
turn my head to see her and the other surprise was from a girl that was a part of our group and
next to me and had begun screaming when an employee had slid in front of our group trying to
scare at least one of us. This actually had no effect on any of us except the girl because she
doesnt like scary things and had startled me when I heard her loud pitched voice screaming in
my ear. I did enjoy going on the rides as any other person would enjoy going on a roller coaster. I
was hoping for more jump scares within the mazes or when walking around in the scare zones. A
way to improve this space is by increasing the number of scarers within the mazes or scare zones
in order to increase the number of people that will begin to run and scream. Another thing to
change is the lighting of the little game booths in order to give a scarier effect and not see the
scarers in front of us. By hiring more people to work as a monster the park could gain more
reputation as a very scary place to go when Freight Fest is active in October. Another thing that
could be changed are the mazes they have. Two years ago I had gone into a maze called
Chupacabra and was scared the first time, but when going again for the second time it wasnt

Murillo-Ordaz 3
as scary because it is the same and I was able to remember where the monster where located
within the maze.

Fig.1. Ticket Proof of going to theme park. 24 October 2015.

Fig. 2. Proof of Purchase. 24 October 2015.

Murillo-Ordaz 4
Works Cited
Proof of Purchase, House. Personal photograph by author. 2015.
Ticket Proof of going to Theme Park, House. Personal photograph by author. 2015.