Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum Tickets: Prices and Guide

There are waivers for visitors to sign before entry. Not ordinary liability forms in case you fall off the staircase. Waivers that acknowledge that the place has cursed items and you are willing to risk anything they may do to you.

That is the best piece of theater in Las Vegas or a real warning depending on your perception of it, and that will decide if this is worth your time for an afternoon visit.

Below are what you get in return for the money, what is inside and why some of them are turned away right at the door.

The short version

The tickets for The Haunted Museum of Zak Bagans are for timed tours of the Wengert Mansion of 1938 located downtown in Las Vegas for a period of roughly 90 minutes in more than thirty rooms. Admission costs have been hovering around mid fifties and senior, local and military discounts available on identification. There are no larger groups than twelve people. Booking in advance is nearly mandatory since spaces tend to sell out fast.

What you get for the money

The experience is guided, not a museum where you can walk and see things at your own pace. It is a guided tour throughout the entire building through its many rooms and a guide tells you the story behind each item. You need not wonder what it is for and who made it. If you like reading the labels at your leisure then this may not be for you.

The actual building is part of the attraction. Wengert Mansion has been constructed in 1938 and had quite a few years of its own fame before Zak Bagans purchased it and established The Haunted Museum in 2017. The layout of the place has been thoroughly changed since then with narrow passageways, dim lighting, hidden passageways and sets made as if it were a movie set.

It has earned the award for the Best Museum from Las Vegas Review-Journal year after year and Best Attraction from Las Vegas Weekly. This is good to know in case you expected this to be just another trap for tourists wax museum. It is truly professionally done and lasts an hour and a half.

Tickets, prices and practical details

Detail	What to expect
Where	The Wengert Mansion, downtown Las Vegas
Tour length	Around 90 minutes, guided throughout
Rooms	Over 30
General admission	Around the mid fifties in dollars. Verify before booking
Discounts	Senior, local and military, with valid ID
Group size	Capped at roughly 12 guests per tour
Booking	Reserve ahead. Walk-ups are limited and often refused
Age limit	Under 12s not admitted. Proof of age for everyone
Waiver	Required from every visitor before entry
Effects used	Strobe, fog and flickering lights throughout

One caveat with regards to prices and age restrictions. They both have undergone several changes since the opening of the museum and you can see pages citing ages of 12, 14 and 16 with similar conviction. Go for the official figure from the website on the day you make your booking, because everybody else is quoting something which was valid at one time or another.

What is actually inside

The exhibitions are composed of artefacts that carry with them a certain history and they rotate, meaning you cannot expect a certain thing without doing your homework first.

The main attraction of the museum is the dybbuk box, the wine cabinet that created all sorts of bad luck reports after its sale in eBay and became the inspiration for a movie. The haunted doll with an extensive mail trail of people who claim that looking at her picture left them ill. There is the staircase from the house in Gary, Indiana which Bagans bought and later demolished. There is the car linked to an assisted suicide activist which is what most people take home with them.

Apart from that there are artefacts connected to individuals who were killers. That is the section of the museum that gets the flak and I will revisit it later.

The exhibition rooms themselves carry much of the burden. Rather than a simple gallery room they are environments, in which you walk through scenes rather than cabinets. Whether that makes the object more or less important is the fundamental debate with regards to the place.

The two tours, and which one to book

	Standard tour	Late night ghost tour
Length	Around 90 minutes	Around 90 minutes
Group	Up to about 12 people	Up to 30 in the whole building
Style	Guided, room by room	Largely unguided, free roam
Equipment	None	Spirit boxes and EMF meters provided
Lighting	Low, but lit	Flashlights
Price	Standard admission	Significantly more
Best for	First visit, the stories and the building	Returning visitors and believers

My advice is – go for the tour first. The guides are the product of this attraction, the objects do not mean anything without the stories behind them, and it is a pity to go through the entire collection with the flashlight and no knowledge about it. The nighttime visit becomes a better experience only when a visitor knows what he is going to see or when the main point is the equipment and not the historical background.

The rules revealed at the entrance

• Everyone signs a release form. This step cannot be avoided and there is no way to have the tour without it
• Bring your identification. The verification of age is obligatory for all visitors regardless of their appearance
• Large bags are not allowed. There is the place where you can leave them, but this step will take extra time that you cannot afford
• No outside food and drink, and there is no drugs, alcohol and firearms inside the building
• All groups above twelve visitors should be divided into separate tours, and a large company will not stay together
• The time slot on your ticket is exact and cannot be changed

A special attention should be paid to the strobe lights and fog machines. If there are people in your company with photosensitive epilepsy, this is not the museum for them, and this is not the issue to compromise with.

Is it worth to visit

In exchange for the price of average Vegas buffet you get ninety minutes in a really unusual museum with a competent guide. Compared to many other attractions located nearby, the price of such visit is rather fair, and it is far from the list of the worst hours in this city.

It is worth visiting for those who watch Ghost Adventures, for people interested in objects with a story behind them, or those who want something more than gambling, a show or waiting in line to the buffet in Vegas. It is not worth visiting if you expect a conventional museum, if you prefer to visit it on your own or if you expect to feel scared during the visit because it is not the case, but the attraction is fascinating.

There will be no evidence of anything supernatural in this museum, because it does not exist, but you will learn many interesting stories about objects that people think have hurt them. It is a really interesting experience to listen to them.

What is worth thinking about before visiting the museum

Part of the items in this collection belongs to people who have killed other people. There is a name for this type of collecting, and there are critics of such practice, and the objection is not squeamishness.

The argument against is rather simple – each of these objects has victims behind them, some of them have living families, and the fact that the objects of killer become an attraction means that the worst day for them becomes somebody’s tour. The relatives of victims have said that many times in regard to such museums.

The argument for is that these objects exist regardless of their display, that the museum with the context behind them is better than the private collector who does not share anything about them, and that the public interest in such material is not going to disappear.

Both positions are honestly held and you should know which one you agree with before you buy Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum tickets, rather than working it out in the room. It is also the clearest difference between somewhere like this and a place such as the genuinely notorious sites we have covered elsewhere, where the history came first and the visitors arrived afterwards.

When to go

Book the earliest slot of the day if you want the calmest tour and the most attention from your guide. Late afternoon and evening slots go first, and the building gets noticeably busier once the Strip empties out for dinner.

October is the worst month for availability by a wide margin and the best month for atmosphere, so decide which of those you care about. The rest of the year, a weekday slot booked two or three days ahead is usually comfortable.

It sits downtown rather than on the Strip, so build in the travel time. It is a short ride from Fremont Street and an easy one to pair with the rest of downtown rather than treating it as a detour from a Strip day.

Frequently asked questions