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Haunted House

A spooky mansion with a working drop tower ride hidden inside its spire.

4.3/5

Set 10273 · 2020

Pieces3,232

Minifigs9

Year2020

Set number10273

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The verdict

If you grew up on the old Adventurers theme, or you just love a big display piece with a real play function, this one's an easy yes.

It stands about 68cm tall, it's stuffed with details and sneaky callbacks, and the drop tower ride genuinely works. Just know going in that the crank can be fiddly and the build gets a touch repetitive. It retired in December 2023, so you're buying secondhand now, but it's still one of the most characterful big sets LEGO has made.

Best for: 90s Adventurers fans and modular-style builders who want a play feature

The full review

Here's the pitch for the Haunted House LEGO® set: take a towering three-story haunted mansion, then hide a full working drop tower ride inside its spire. It's the very first release in the Fairground Collection, and it leans hard into nostalgia. The mansion is the old home of Baron Samuel von Barron, the mustache-twirling villain from the 1998-2000 Adventurers sets, and it's stuffed with the treasures he looted from around the globe. If those names ring a bell, you're exactly who this set was made for, and you'll be grinning at the references the whole way through. Even if they don't, the sheer moody detail of the place is a lot of fun to put together.

The star feature is the ride. You crank a lever on the back, a chain and sprocket haul the car up the tower, a ratchet stops it dropping early, and at the top it trips a set of doors before gravity yanks it back down onto rubber stoppers at the base. When it's dialed in, it's genuinely satisfying to send that car up and crashing down over and over. It's also Powered Up compatible if you'd rather motorize it instead of turning the handle yourself. The whole thing stands about 68cm tall, so it's a proper centerpiece, not a shelf-filler.

Now the honest bit. That crank mechanism divides people. Jay's Brick Blog found the mechanics impressive on paper but a little shoddy in practice, with the crank getting tiring and old fast, and plenty of builders had to fine-tune the gears to run smoothly. The build itself is enjoyable but has repetitive stretches, and Brickset's reviewer felt it reads more like a modular building than a bright, playful fairground attraction. The nine minifigs are a fun crew (fairground visitors, workers, a pair of creepy butler twins, and two ghosts), but the ghosts being plain white instead of the beloved classic glow-in-the-dark ghost is a genuine missed trick for a set built on nostalgia.

So who should grab it? If you're an Adventurers fan, someone who loves a detailed display build, or a builder who wants a working play feature, this is a delight and worth hunting down. If you specifically want the bright, cheerful fairground vibe of the carousel and Ferris wheel, or you get frustrated by finicky mechanisms, temper your expectations a little. It's retired as of December 2023, so you'll be buying on the aftermarket (BrickEconomy has tracked sealed copies drifting around and above the old $299.99 retail), so shop around before paying top dollar. For character and detail per brick, though, it still holds up as one of LEGO's best big sets of that era, and the community score of 4.3 out of 5 backs that up.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

The build spreads across three floors and comfortably fills a few evenings. You start with the base and the drop tower's internals, which is the technical heart of the set, then work up through the rooms, and each floor has enough of its own personality that it rarely feels like a slog even at 3,231 pieces. The techniques lean modular, with lots of detailed interior and exterior work, so if you enjoy building the modular buildings you'll feel right at home. The main gripe on pacing is the drop tower mechanism itself, which takes patience to get running smoothly, plus a few wall sections that repeat.

On the parts front there's no brand-new mold, but the recolors and prints are the real draw. The 33-degree inner corner slope shows up in black for the first time ever, a part that had only appeared in a handful of sets before this one. Every decoration is printed rather than stickered, and some prints are lovely deep cuts, like the 1x2 computer tile that hadn't turned up in a set since 2004 and returns straight out of the 90s. The new 1x2 piano and organ key tiles are quietly the most useful thing in the box, because LEGO previously only made keyboard prints in 1x4, so builders finally get keyboards that aren't stuck in widths of four. At roughly 0.09 per piece with zero stickers, the part-count value here was strong for a set with this much printed character.

Fun facts

01It was the first set released under LEGO's Fairground Collection banner, kicking off a line built around amusement-park attractions.
02The mansion belongs to Baron Samuel von Barron, the villain from the 1998-2000 Adventurers theme, and it's packed with loot he stole, including an Anubis head, a Sphinx head, and a hieroglyphic obelisk pulled straight from those old sets.
03It stands roughly 68cm (about 27 inches) tall, making it one of the tallest LEGO buildings released up to that point.
04The house is haunted by the ghost of Pharaoh Hotep, whose tomb the Baron disturbed, tying the spooky story back into the Adventurers lore.