- October 23, 2026
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The closer you get to Scream-a-Geddon, the more the landscape seems to conspire with it.
Streetlights disappear. Master-planned communities and commercial corridors give way to rolling pastures and the occasional lichen-covered orange grove. Soon, the road narrows and twists underneath a stifling canopy of ancient southern live oaks thick with Spanish moss and scrub brush. Their contorted limbs cast shapes in the headlights while their looming branches blot out the moon.
By the time customers reach the 118-acre horror attraction, at the end of Saint Joe Road just outside Pasco County’s Dade City, the man behind the monsters hopes the surroundings have already done some of his work for him.
“We’re surrounded by this beautiful oak forest, which we can really make quite creepy at night,” says Benjamin Nagengast, CEO and founder of family-owned entertainment development and management company Point Summit. “Yes we’re a smaller operation than some of the big theme parks’ Halloween attractions, but because we’re a bit out of town we can use that to our advantage. A lot of people in the city aren’t used to driving down roads that aren’t lit at night, and it can be quite spooky.”
The dark, rural setting is an essential part of the business model for Point Summit’s cast of attractions, says Nagengast, 40. The Dade City site is home to the company’s signature Scream-a-Geddon haunted house park in the fall. Then it transforms into the Snowcat Ridge snow sledding attraction and WunderGlow Christmas lights display during the holiday season. The property also hosts TreeHoppers Aerial Adventure Park, a zipline and aerial adventure attraction, year-round.
Point Summit operates similar simultaneous businesses on a property in Nagengast’s hometown of Anderson, Indiana. And while the attractions themselves are seasonal, the company behind them is not. The business in total does at least $10 million a year in revenue, says Nagengast, and serves hundreds of thousands of guests a year in both Florida and Indiana. It has some 500 employees at peak season.
“For us, as far as the operations and management side, we are busy year-round,” Nagengast says. “As soon as the parks close, we start our planning for the next season. The work never stops.”
Nagengast’s career in attractions began in 1999, when the then-13 year old set up a small paintball course on his parents’ 75-acre farm in Anderson. He named his venture after the nearby White River and began inviting friends over to play.
For a while, White River Paintball was more of a weekend hobby than a viable company. His side business drew fewer than 1,000 people a year in its early days, Nagengast says. A strong weekend might bring 30 or 40 players to his backyard. Other days, nobody came.
After high school, Nagengast went to work at his parents’ engineering company, yet couldn’t give up running the paintball field on the weekends. Eventually, he decided doing both was unsustainable.
He chose paintball.
It was seven years before White River Paintball was profitable enough that Nagengast began taking regular paychecks, he says. His parents helped finance its early growth, but required him to present his business plan first and repay the money after. Their largest contribution, he says, was allowing him to use the family farm. In 2008 White River Paintball moved out of his parents’ home and into its own 125-acre property nearby.
The transition into a haunted attraction began a year later, when a local charity asked Nagengast to stage a haunted house on the paintball property. The event was Nagengast’s introduction to the seasonal entertainment industry, a notoriously difficult field laden with extreme work crunches, financial uncertainty and compressed timelines despite short event windows. That venture became Indy Scream Park.
“It’s a very different state of mind as an entrepreneur because you're engaging in an immense amount of risk before you actually have revenue,” Nagengast says. “And then you have this limited window, and if you don’t operate during that limited window there’s not a lot of people who want to go to a haunted house in the middle of November. You either hit the season correctly or you have to wait till next year to try again.”
He moved to Florida with his wife in 2011 and formed Point Summit. The business acquired its Dade City property in 2015 and opened Scream-a-Geddon and TreeHoppers there.
The rural site offered something difficult to find closer to Tampa: enough relatively affordable land to build an immersive environment without immediately colliding with neighbors or, even scarier, more valuable residential and commercial developments. Pasco County Property Appraiser records show companies managed by Nagengast paid a combined $1.33 million for two parcels totaling roughly 118 acres to build Scream-A-Geddon, TreeHoppers and Snowcat Ridge — $750,000 for the original property in 2015 and $584,400 for the adjoining land in 2018.
“It was the ability for us to have enough room and enough space to operate that really drew us in,” Nagengast says. “We’ve seen other operations try to build their parks with far less size, and you eventually run out of room.”
One of Nagengast’s most important strategy techniques is considerably less theatrical than zombies, chain saws and killer clowns: customer surveys.
Point Summit keeps up with current trends in the scare industry by simply asking visitors what frightens them, which attractions they prefer, what experiences they want added and even what food they would buy. Nagengast credits that research with helping the company decide where to direct its capital.
“Our most successful action was surveying our guests and understanding what they liked and what they didn’t like,” he says. “That’s a big element of our success: understanding what our guests want and how we can provide that to them.”
Those responses have shaped both incremental upgrades and entirely new parks.
At Scream-a-Geddon, Point Summit, for one, has replaced portable toilets with permanent restrooms, paved guest areas and added shelters, as well as invested in food and beverage service. Ahead of its 2026 opening Aug. 29, the company created the new “Bonzo’s Bizarre,” a $2.5 million midway expansion with paved structures and additional dining options. The 50,000-square-foot carnival-themed scare zone is the central hub for the park’s six haunted house attractions, where guests mingle with creepy clown character Bonzo and his terrifying troupe while playing carnival-style midway games and even hatchet throwing.
Among the park’s signature haunted experiences are interactive attractions where actors may separate consenting visitors from their groups, and Zombie Paintball Assault, where customers shoot at costumed zombies from a moving vehicle.
While Point Summit cannot match the scale or intellectual property of events operated by nearby Busch Gardens Tampa Bay or the Orlando theme parks, Nagengast says it stays relevant in the haunted house world by focusing on experiences those larger competitors may find difficult to replicate.
That includes sending visitors through a dark oak forest, allowing more intense, one-on-one interactions with performers and spacing groups out rather than feeding customers continuously through each house.
“We would rather be accused of being too scary than not scary enough,” Nagengast says.
Being scary — and operating a haunted park — requires a lot of work and is not without its challenges.
Point Summit must hire roughly 200 employees for Scream-a-Geddon within weeks of opening, train them and prepare the property before ticket revenue begins coming in. Designing a haunted house can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars before accounting for the building itself, Nagengast says. Props, costumes, lighting, sound, scenic construction, electrical systems and pneumatics require a year-round team supplemented by outside artisans.
Traditional financing can also be scarce.
“I don’t know of any banks that will finance a haunted house operation as a startup,” Nagengast says.
Weather brings another layer of uncertainty.
Scream-a-Geddon operates during the height of the Atlantic hurricane season. Nagengast, for example, says storms like Hurricane Milton erased about 40% of the company’s revenue for the 2024 season.
Insurance is yet another broader concern across the haunted-attraction business. During last year’s Haunted Attraction Association’s 2025 State of the Industry seminar, operators described difficulty retaining affordable coverage and identified insurance stability, employee training and safety certification as major priorities.
“People see our industry as a quick payout … but a safety-minded haunt is statistically safer than going to the grocery store,” President Jim Werner told the group during his address. “We just look like an easy target.”
Nagengast says Point Summit has increased its safety spending as attendance has grown. The company employs a full-time security director and returning security personnel who know the property, rather than relying solely on contractors unfamiliar with the parks.
The company also caps the number of people sent through each haunted attraction per hour, even if doing so lengthens the line.
“The more people you have at the park, the higher risk you’re going to have,” he says. “There are risks that we’re just not willing to take.”
Point Summit’s answer to seasonality has been to fill more of the calendar while reusing the Dade City property.
Snowcat Ridge, which opened in 2020, brings snow tubing, ice skating and holiday entertainment to Florida. Point Summit’s largest park by attendance and its most expensive to operate, its centerpiece is a snow-tubing hill measuring roughly 60 feet tall and more than 400 feet long. The attraction required the company to learn how to manufacture and maintain snow in Florida without an established local operating model to follow.
Point Summit is considering properties and acquisitions in other markets, but Nagengast says the company is selective. Any new site needs sufficient land, workable regulations and room for future expansion. Because a park can consume years of research and creative effort, the company has yet to commit to another location.
For now, its expansion strategy remains centered on the dark woods of Dade City: scare visitors in the fall, put them on ice in the winter and give them another reason to return once the screams have stopped.
“There are plenty of other things we could do with our creative time and energy,” Nagengast says. “But we’ve gotten good at this, and we really like doing it.”
