KENNYWOOD
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Abbreviation: KW)
Owned by Herschend
Park News - (8/31/2025) Kennywood has announced that they are canceling a series of 21+ Adult only night events at the park for good. Effective immediately, all of these planned events are now canceled. This move comes after fights broke out in the park between adults on both of the first two nights that took place on August 22 and Aug 29th.
You might say that of the new park owners that “Herschend Don’t Play”, as the official statement from Kennywood is that the park has a ‘zero-tolerance policy for this type of behavior,” and that anyone caught being disruptive in the park will be banned.
If you're curious about what happened, one of the fights between a pair of women was caught on video from the first night, which you can see in the news report below, so it comes as no surprise that Kennywood is now putting an end to this after it happened again on the second night.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m cautious to see how things play out for Phantom Fall Fest. The new park owners, Herschend, have traditionally not held scary Halloween events at any of their parks, and put a stop to the ones that were held at the Wild Adventures park several years after they bought it in favor of hosting a more family friendly event. Given that Kennywood’s haunt event has made the headlines in year’s past due to security issues at the park, including an unfortunate shooting in 2022, I’d say that the future of the event may already be on thin ice. Of course Kennywood has greatly increased security since then, and I’m sure those efforts will be beefed up even more this year under the new owners, especially in light of these new issues, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
Unfortunately, as I’ve been fond of saying over the years, “People Ruin Everything”, which is sort of my own pessimistic version of the classic saying, “This is why we can’t have nice things”, when the poor actions of a few ruin or cancel a loved event for everyone else. So lets hope for heavy security and maybe… just maybe… a stop to alcohol sales in the park as well. Why poke the bear, huh?
2026 - Nothing is known at this point in time...
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