Maniacally grinning weirdos barging into your hotel room to shriek insanely at you, crank phone calls until all hours and incessant banging on the wall. Normally if you experience these sorts of interruptions to a night's sleep, you've had the misfortune to book into an establishment also playing host to a stag party or touring rugby club. But if subjecting yourself to this sort of nocturnal terror sounds more treat than trick, a stay in one of Alton Towers Hotel's new Scare Rooms could be just the ticket.

It's all in aid of Halloween, of course, a festival the theme park is enthusiastically embracing with a host of spooky activities on offer during its Scarefest. Prices for a stay in a Scare Room start from £46 per person and the one thing guaranteed not to await those retiring for the night is a good kip. The five rooms have been given a suitably ghoulish makeover with red lighting, ripped curtains and blood-stained walls.

Guests can also expect to find themselves tripping over gruesome props, including hideously mutilated soft toys and wooden stakes. The latter could come in handy when warding off visitations from the assorted spectres and fiends that are the hellish highlights of this particular fright night.

These are, of course, actors and not genuine denizens of the underworld but, with a revolving cast including the grim reaper, knife-wielding maniacs, an evil clown and a very promising-sounding demonic butcher (complete with slabs of rotten meat), these do sound a cut above the moth-eaten giant bears and rabbits usually found wandering unsteadily around theme parks.

If it sounds like your worst nightmare then you're probably the sort of person who thinks the modern, commercial Halloween is a desperately crass American import on a par with McDonalds and Starbucks. If, on the other (severed) hand, you thrill at the sight of a jack-o-lantern flickering in the frosty twilight and like nothing better than spending October 31 scaring yourself witless with Japanese horror films, then you might just have found your ideal weekend break.

£46, after all, is a very reasonable rate for a hotel room and, if you pay that little anywhere else, you're pretty much guaranteed wild grunting in the corridors and unexplained tapping on the window. The reign of terror apparently stops at 2am but either way, you're likely to wake the next day with shredded nerves and a cadaverous appearance, which, I suppose, is the point. Granted this is how most parents will look anyway after a day spent supervising their little darlings around a theme park but I suspect those with very small children won't be checking in.

Perhaps you think paying the best part of £50 to be harassed long into the night by jobbing actors sounds like hell-on-earth but I think a spot of light haunting followed by some intensive rollercoaster riding to blow away the cobwebs the next day sounds like a great alternative to your bog-standard hotel stay.

· Book at altontowers.com