Cleaning up litter, Tony Wohlgemuth spots the scared little boy. Alone and confused, the child’s doe eyes dart around the adventure park, skimming the tractor-pulled wagon rides and concession stands, the corn maze and rock-climbing wall. An autumn breeze carries the sugar-high aroma of kettle corn and exclamations of laughter, but this kid is sealed up in distress.

“We’ve got a lost boy,” Tony reports into his radio headset, hurrying through a crowd of revelers noshing on funnel cakes and debating where to go next. As Tony closes in, a flustered grandmother shuffles onto the scene and lays claim to the small package.

Tony Wohlgemuth and his childhood buddies had a dream. But it wasn’t until he met his wife, Donna, that Kersey Valley became a sensation. photograph by Jerry Wolford & Scott Muthersbaugh

Tony tilts back his cap — emblazoned with the word MOTIVATED — and makes sure that all is well with the reunited family. Then he continues his rounds, popping into Santa’s Workshop, which is still weeks away from its seasonal debut but already a peppermint fever dream of red, white, and holly. He tidies up one of the park’s concession kitchens. Though Tony now presides over this fantasyland known as Kersey Valley, he was once a boy himself, struggling to find his way on these same rolling acres.

As the leaves turn, families and giddy teenagers begin flocking to Kersey Valley in Archdale. Tens of thousands drive on a narrow country road for the ziplines and trampolines, the 30 varieties of rich fudge, the cold brew coffee concoctions and creatively titled cocktails. They come for Spookywoods, which includes a Halloween haunted house and fright-filled wooded trail. For the meandering corn maze that baffles entrants throughout the season. And as fall turns to winter, they come for the multiple Santas and their jingling accoutrements that arrive for Christmas.

All the while, the throngs breeze right past Tony. If they notice him at all, they just see a sturdily built, brown-eyed head honcho tramping about in cargo pants and waterproof boots, tending to every major and minor bit of park business.

Squint, though, and in Tony’s industriousness, you catch a glimpse of the determined youth who, decades before, mustered all of his resources to hold on to what he treasured most: his family’s farm. And who, with a posse of pals worthy of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, saved the farm that seemingly had no future.

Everybody loves the mighty Kersey Valley Express. photograph by Jerry Wolford & Scott Muthersbaugh

Tony’s childhood friends are all grown now, but many still come here, still pitch in by helping to bring the fantastical attractions to life, drawn to the magic of possibility. For not all of the spirits that inhabit Kersey Valley — the Halloween ghouls, the timeless Kris Kringles — are anonymous people playing dress-up. They’re family and friends. The past lurks close to the surface here. Ghosts and tender memories rise up to make Tony’s eyes mist and his voice quiver.

In these moments, Tony is not the entrepreneur, not the grown-up. He is again the brave boy trying with everything he has to save his family’s home and make a believer out of one particular person thousands of miles away: his father.

Throughout the cool months, this rural adventure park is a wonderworld, but its greatest wonder may be the aching loss and storybook gambit at the heart of how it came to be. To uncover this tale, we must travel back to the 1980s and meet The Fun Bunch — a ragged band of teenagers who would eventually pull off the miracle that’s now known as Kersey Valley. Almost every day, the kids would convene at the Wohlgemuth family’s rambling ranch house, and from there, they’d spill out onto the rolling landscape.

“We’d fly model airplanes, play in the creek, camp,” says Micah Cox, who used to scurry through a 100-foot drainage pipe under the highway to get from his house to visit his best friend Tony. There, in an environment that seemed idyllic, Tony’s mom, Irene, would serve fresh-baked sweet treats. But while The Fun Bunch sported, Tony’s dad struggled.

Kids embark on a ride through the pumpkin patch in a 10-cow-long train. photograph by Jerry Wolford & Scott Muthersbaugh

Glowing with gusto, Robert Wohlgemuth had moved his family to North Carolina from Zurich, Switzerland, in 1968 to bird-dog the American Dream. The elder Wohlgemuth envisioned making it not only as the lead salesperson for a factory equipment company, but also as a man of the land, which led him to settle his brood on this 65-acre former tobacco farm.

Tony was born in 1970, the youngest of five boys. He idolized his full-throttle father. Together, they planted rows of pine trees in 1979 in hopes of selling them as Christmas trees. The grove would indeed play a role in the farm’s fortunes — but not as intended. By the time they were ready to harvest, many years later, the family’s situation had changed dramatically. “My dad had the passion,” Tony says. “He just couldn’t put the dots together.”

The array of attractions at Kersey Valley maximize opportunities to play. photograph by Jerry Wolford & Scott Muthersbaugh

Robert was struggling financially. His business clients could not make their payments and declared bankruptcy. And the farm’s expenses just kept coming. Drained and demoralized, he announced that he was done with America and its elusive dream. He put the farm up for sale and returned to Switzerland.

Tony and his mother, however, stayed put. Irene thrived on the cooking and knitting classes that she taught at Guilford Technical Community College. And Tony — whose brothers were old enough to leave the nest — felt connected by his very ribs to The Fun Bunch and the farm’s acres of adventures. The spell that the place had on Tony was so powerful that the teenager, still a student at Allen Jay Middle School in nearby High Point, resolved to pay the mortgage himself and save the farm at Kersey Valley.

Tony’s first plan — to make it as a farmer — flopped. Oh, he and The Fun Bunch succeeded in bringing corn, okra, and tomatoes to the local farmers market. But there, the wily older growers undercut their prices until, Micah recalls, “we were pretty much giving the stuff away for free.”

Still, Tony made time to cut loose with The Fun Bunch. One fateful summer night, they camped out in a dilapidated packhouse turned clubhouse. The packhouse stood only a few yards from the property’s original clapboard farmhouse — abandoned and woebegone for years.

Boo! Tony and Donna prepared the old farmhouse for another night of fright back in 1995. Photography courtesy of Tony Wohlgemuth

The old farmhouse was even said to come with a ghost. During the Great Depression, a portly traveling fiddler arranged to board in an upstairs bedroom. Soon, he took ill and died. Because of his large size, the man remained there until a crew with ropes could arrive from town to lower his body through the window. The indignity of it all gave rise to an angry phantom who, according to legend, often banged about in the bedroom.

On that oven-hot night in the packhouse, a torrent of Fun Bunch dares prompted Micah and another friend to venture over to the ghost’s lair. There, they came under attack. Not by a poltergeist, but by bats. Later that summer, Micah mused to his friends, “Why don’t we turn the place into a haunted house and make some money?”

The notion sounded considerably more fun to Tony than losing money on corn. “Yeah,” he said. “How hard can that be?”

The Fun Bunch’s first go during Halloween 1985 scared up all their school chums, who eagerly forked over precious dollars to quake at Micah, who was laid out in a coffin with an actual tongue-flashing ball python curled on his face and Tony swinging a revved-up chainsaw. By the third year, adults were queuing up, too.

The old farmhouse decked in spooky splendor in the 1980s. Photography courtesy of Tony Wohlgemuth

But while Kersey Valley’s thrills were hot news in Archdale, Tony’s father remained far away — a spectral figure on a distant continent with whom his son could share information but never quite connect. “When I explained what we were doing, he didn’t understand,” Tony says. “He couldn’t believe that people were paying to be scared.”

Tony had the mortgage under control, but he still didn’t have his father back.

As time passed, he harvested bigger and better scares at the old farm, even as his original team began to shrink. College and other callings had taken The Fun Bunch in separate directions. Recalling those times today, Micah, now living some 200 miles away in Wilmington, stifles a sob. “You learn when you’re an adult that life can be hard,” he says. “But those were golden days; the best days of my life.”

In 1989, while still tending to Kersey Valley’s Halloween happenings, Tony headed to Guilford Technical Community College. In a computer class, he encountered a spirited young woman named Donna Ward. They later dated briefly, then split. But the uncanny pull of Kersey Valley would not be denied. Two years later, the couple wound up together again in yet another computer class. This time, they stayed together, married, and turbo-charged the farm.

“He’s like a dog with a bone — he won’t let go,” Donna says of Tony. “And I don’t sit still.” She laughs. “If you can’t give a job 110 percent, don’t do it.”

Following this maxim of maximality, the couple added laser tag, escape rooms, and axe-throwing to attract customers year-round. For the fall season, they included rides and concessions and a dauntingly expansive corn maze that features an embedded game to help visitors find their way out.

During crisp fall afternoons, parents and kids browse the pumpkin patch. photograph by Jerry Wolford & Scott Muthersbaugh

For Christmas, they trimmed the farm with two million twinkling lights and created prop-filled photo studios in which families pose with a Santa of their choice — the familiar roly-poly, red-suited toy-slinger or, in a nod to Tony’s Swiss roots, a trimmer, slightly solemn European version.

The pines that Tony and his dad had planted decades earlier with the intention to harvest as Christmas trees are now fully grown — and they do double duty. In December, they make a lush background for Kersey Valley’s Yuletide romps. In October, they drape brooding shadows over the monsters lying in wait for guests braving the Spookywoods walking tour.

Things get darker at night. In 1999, Tony’s dad (as Dr. Twitch) teamed up with Donna to add a psychological twist to the horror show. Photography courtesy of Tony Wohlgemuth

And the number of guests that Tony sees has skyrocketed. Last year, around 100,000 revelers wandered wide-eyed through Kersey Valley, and more than 300 staff took home paychecks. And then there was the time, way back in October 1999, when even the man whose spirit had long haunted Kersey Valley returned in the flesh. “The place was packed,” Tony remembers. “I opened the door and was shocked. There’s my dad with a suitcase!”

Wanting to witness with his own eyes the phenomenon that his son had been describing to him all those years, Robert Wohlgemuth had hopped a plane, then a cab from the airport, and arrived back at his old forlorn farm. He was delighted to see the traffic swarming the area.

“He got ’hold of Tony,” Donna remembers, “and he was so proud. After that, they got tighter and tighter. He’d been rooting for his boy the whole time.”

The elder Wohlgemuth even pitched in, donning a medical costume, dubbing himself Dr. Twitch, and leaning into his European accent to interview bemused customers about the “issues” that led them to want to be scared.

Tony’s dad didn’t stay, but the ache that had rattled around Kersey Valley like that legendary ghost in the old farmhouse was gone. Sadly, in 2012, Robert Wohlgemuth died back home in a Swiss village. Irene remains at the farm today, although, at 92, she’s no longer able to provide the crew with homemade cookies and other traditional Swiss treats. But Tony and Donna persist, and Kersey Valley is all the better for it.

When night falls, the adventure park fizz that’s perfectly pleasing by day transmutes into an intoxicating brew of blazing lights, laser projections, and happy screams. Teenagers skirr about, their trailing perfumes and colognes adding to the midway’s cloud of sweet scents. Purple-black silhouettes of towering trees surround the place like an impregnable wall fending off reality.

Tony and Donna transform, too. No longer the park’s nondescript chief workhorses, they roam the crackling night during Halloween incognito, dressed up like everybody else, and joining unsuspecting guests for group photos.

And so the magic of Kersey Valley shines on. Here, ordinary people struggling with common problems become the sparkly stuff of fairy tales. Season by season, they navigate one maze after another, with luck and pluck emerging on the other side.

“I still talk to Dad every now and then,” Tony says matter-of-factly. “I know he must still think this is one crazy place.”

Kersey Valley
1615 Kersey Valley Road
Archdale, NC 27263
(336) 431-1700
kerseyvalley.com