Hay Day is taking its Halloween campaign somewhere most farming games would never go: a supposedly haunted English manor farm. Supercell’s mobile game has recruited paranormal investigator and Most Haunted presenter Yvette Fielding to explore whether ghosts might be interested in a little virtual farming.
Created with Forsman & Bodenfors, the campaign turns an investigation at Cogges Manor Farm in Oxfordshire into a story about a new Halloween character, the Red Revenant. Rather than leading with a conventional game update, Hay Day has built a piece of paranormal entertainment around the launch.
Table of contents
Why Hay Day went ghost hunting
A haunted farm becomes game content
The Halloween film makes the joke feel real
Why Hay Day went ghost hunting
Hay Day’s everyday promise is reassuringly simple: plant crops, look after animals and build a farm at your own pace. Its official game description emphasizes a cheerful rural escape, not jump scares or supernatural encounters.
That contrast gives the Halloween campaign its hook. Fielding, whose television career is closely associated with paranormal investigations, brings the recognizable conventions of ghost-hunting entertainment into a game built around comfort.
The team visited Cogges Manor Farm, a historic location in Oxfordshire, and conducted a séance as part of the film. The campaign presents the investigation as an attempt to make contact with the farm’s ghostly history, rather than claiming to have established that ghosts exist or can actually play mobile games.
For the brand, the question is deliberately playful. What would happen if the audience for a cozy farming game extended beyond the living?
A haunted farm becomes game content
The investigation does more than provide atmospheric footage. According to the campaign announcement, local ghost lore encountered at the farm helped shape the Red Revenant, a new Halloween character appearing in Hay Day.
That connection gives the creative a clear path from entertainment back into the product. Viewers can encounter the character through the film and then recognize the idea inside the game. The campaign is rolling out internationally through digital, social and in-game activity ahead of Halloween.
“Hay Day has always been this cozy place where players come to unwind and escape the chaos of everyday life,” said Hay Day general manager Maya Hofree in the campaign announcement. She joked that even ghosts could use some of that coziness after centuries of haunting.
The seasonal character also gives existing players something to discover without requiring the game to abandon its established tone. Hay Day is not suddenly becoming a horror title. It is using horror’s familiar visual language to make its existing world feel timely.
The Halloween film makes the joke feel real
The creative treatment borrows from paranormal investigation documentaries. A real presenter, a historic location and the rituals of a ghost hunt give the story a more distinctive shape than a straightforward Halloween product trailer.
The film was produced by B-Reel Films and directed by Torbjörn Martin. Forsman & Bodenfors creatives Julia Holtback Yeter and Karl Risenfors said the idea grew from an overlap between Hay Day’s audience and interest in paranormal entertainment.
Their aim, they said, was to create an entertainment experience that audiences could enter, rather than simply announce another game character.
The campaign film, Hay Day: Haunted Farms, is available through Hay Day’s official YouTube channel. Its documentary framing is important to the idea: the campaign lets the serious conventions of ghost hunting collide with a deliberately gentle farming game.
The joke works because neither side has to become something else. Fielding plays the paranormal investigator; Hay Day remains the place where even an imaginary ghost might relax.
What marketers can learn
Halloween promotions often lean on costumes, limited-edition visuals or licensed horror characters. Hay Day takes a different route by borrowing a recognizable entertainment format and connecting its story directly to an in-game addition.
The approach resembles a wider shift toward brands building seasonal entertainment worlds, rather than relying on a single holiday-themed advertisement. Fanta’s Halloween Haunted Universe, for example, uses original characters and repeatable experiences to give a seasonal promotion a larger narrative frame.
Hay Day’s execution is smaller and more specific. It chooses one memorable question, one credible personality and one unusual setting, then uses those elements to introduce the Red Revenant.
There are no publicly disclosed performance figures yet, so the campaign’s commercial impact remains unknown. Its creative lesson is easier to see: a seasonal activation can feel like a story worth watching when the product has a genuine role in the payoff.
