Haunted Farms

This Halloween, mobile game Hay Day invites real ghosts to play the game. In a one-of-a-kind paranormal experiment ahead of Halloween, Hay Day and Forsman & Bodenfors test the boundaries of mobile gaming in a new campaign that turns ghosts into players.

Something spooky is growing among the crops in Supercell’s hit mobile farming game, Hay Day. For decades, established paranormal investigator and TV host Yvette Fielding has dedicated her career to making contact with ghosts in the long-running show Most Haunted. This Halloween, Hay Day is taking it one step further, asking the question: what if they can play?

In an unexpected creative clash between classic ghost lore and cozy mobile gaming, Hay Day travelled to the historic Cogges Manor Farm in Oxfordshire, widely considered one of the most haunted places in the UK, to make contact with the ghost living there. A séance conducted by Yvette Fielding helped uncover the farm’s ghost lore, directly shaping Hay Day’s new Halloween ghost character: The Red Revenant.

”Hay Day has always been this cozy place where players come to unwind and escape the chaos of everyday life, whether that’s after a long workday, or apparently, after a few hundred years of haunting an English manor farm. It turns out, even the ghosts could use a little cozy in their life,” said Maya Hofree, Hay Day General Manager.

The campaign taps into a trend that sees more people turning to horror, hauntings, and mediumship as entertainment when the real world feels unstable. This shift also shaped the creative execution, which resembles a ghost investigation documentary rather than a traditional commercial.

”We saw a natural overlap between Hay Day’s audience and the growing fascination with paranormal entertainment. By bringing these two worlds together, we wanted to go beyond a traditional character launch and create an unexpected entertainment experience that players could step into and become part of,” said Julia Holtback Yeter and Karl Risenfors, creatives at Forsman & Bodenfors.

The campaign is created together with creative agency Forsman & Bodenfors and is rolling out globally across digital, social, and in-game moments ahead of Halloween.