Brighton Asylum

I just got back from going through the Brighton Asylum in Passaic, NJ, and it was well worth the $20 admission. From the decor to the actors to the length of the haunt it was an all around good show.

First off, the haunt is in an industrial area of the town, apparently an abandoned factory. Driving through there at night was creepy enough and certainly set the mood. There was plenty of parking (it wasn't crowded at all -- probably its location) and there were helpful (and friendly!) attendants guiding you through. There was also a police presence too to ensure everyone's safety.

The haunt starts off with a small tour of their "museum," of props and artifacts that have appeared in various movies. You then go into the asylum, and right from the get-go, my wife was terrified. The doctors that greeted you were appropriately gory, and the one with the pencil sticking out of her head really scared my wife. Lots of twists and turns and different rooms with actors hidden around every corner.

There was lots of eye candy too for the home haunter to absorb. Some rooms were more bare than others, and I probably would have liked every corridor to be chock full of props, but there was definitely enough to entertain me. The actors were also excellent: their timing was good -- even got me once or twice -- and the make was fairly professional.

Now I'll have to make an admission here: a friend of mine from the NJ Make & Take group on HauntForum is an actor at Brighton Asylum, but that didn't color my judgment at all. If the haunt sucked, I would have said so, but it didn't.

Walking through the haunt, though, I heard an actor working on two women in front of us and I knew that voice. It was Sharon! She has her own haunt too, Bloodcrest Manor, and goes by the name Joiseygal, but tonight she was in full clown regalia. Great job, Sharon!

The haunt had a Claustrophobia run as well, and it must have been one of the big ones because my wife couldn't wait to get out of there. She was really getting claustrophobic and kept asking when is it going to end? Rooms with clowns, rooms with body bags, hanging creepiness, and more! There was a lot to take in. And as I said, it was a fairly long haunt which to me was a positive; to my wife, not so  much. There were plenty of pop up scares, actor scares, and sensory scares (the sparking fuse box was cool).

All in all I really can recommend the Brighton Asylum. Now it does have a sister haunt, a Field of Screams Horror Hayride in Montvale, NJ. Two years ago I attended that one, which was something of a mix of the two and had enjoyed it at the time. Since my wife prefers hayrides (I don't) we'll probably end up going there as well before the end of the month.

Tickets to the Asylum are $20 and $15 for the Hayride. A Combo ticket runs just $27, and if I'm not mistaken you don't have to go to both on the same night. Any time they're open you can use them. So if you have an opportunity to choose a haunt to attend, I can recommend Brighton Asylum.

An Optimal Scare

Normally I use my "Optimum Triple Play" rewards card to go to the movies for free on Tuesdays. When you have Internet, telephone, and cable service through Cablevision, you can get discounts on various products and services, and on Tuesdays they give you two free tickets at any Clearview Cinema (you can get $1 off a ticket any other night of the week).

Today, Cablevision notified me of some "Spooktacular Halloween Savings" on nine different haunted attractions in my area (and one fruit store, go figure), including The Bates Motel and Blood Manor in New York. Aside from the overdone "Spooktacular" verbiage and the fact they should've come up with 13 attractions instead of nine, it looks like a pretty decent benefit.

Some offers are better than others in that I probably wouldn't use s a VIP pass (or is that an RIP pass?) anyway -- these attractions charge way too much to avoid standing in line -- but Six Flags Great Adventure offers 60% off regular ticket prices for their Fright Fest. Then again, that's like buying a can of Coke during the summer that has discount ticket prices printed on them, and with so many promotions out there, I'm not sure anyone pays full price ever.

Still, I might have to check out some of the offers anyway.

Review: Headless Horseman Attraction

Last year I went to the Sleepy Hollow haunt in Tarrytown, NY. It being the home of the original horseman tale I was expecting a lot. It was totally crap and I couldn't recommend it to anyone.

This year I went to Ulster Park, NY, a little further up the Hudson River (okay, a lot further) to visit the Headless Horseman Hayride & Haunted Houses. I've heard a lot of great things about this attraction and I set my expectations bar pretty high, but the actual event simply blew them out of the water. This is a ridiculously detailed haunt, and while $32 a person sounds high-priced, with some of the best props around it is well worth it.

Headless Horseman is actually a haunted hayride on top of a series of haunted house walk-throughs. They say there are 7 houses, and maybe some of them ran together so I didn't realize I was actually in separate haunts, but I did see three distinct areas.

The hayride
If anything, the hayride was maybe the "worst" of the lot, but that could be because I just don't like hayrides. I don't find them scary (admittedly I'm not scared by much) but they just don't have many startles or me. Of course, the rest of the hayride participants seemed plenty startled by a lot of the scenes, so don't let my word sway you.

The sets were richly adorned and perhaps I was distracted looking at all the props. Funny, but as we would pass by a graveyard I spent a lot of time looking at the tombstones to see if they were Styrofoam or not. Some of them were so real looking I would have thought they were real.

The trail you ride along is a mile in length and it was very dark. Living in an area with lots of light pollution, I forget just how many stars there are in the sky. But that gave the actors plenty of opportunity to hide in the shadow and jump out for scares, which was effective for many on the trip. The props were well done (they could have spent a little more time on the train engine) but even by itself the hayride was worth it. Your are brought through a number of sets of small village scenes and various vignettes which tells the story of an old, abandoned jail and the convict that still haunts it.

The Haunted Houses
At the end of the hayride you're let off at the Lunar Hotel, a creepy looking motel, even from the outside. When I saw the line waiting to get in I though it was going to be an arduous wait, but the line was kept moving and was at most 20-30 minutes long. Not bad at all.

From there, you moved into the seven haunted houses and it's simply one terror after another. To be honest I can't remember how long it took us to go through it, but for the two young teens I had in tow, it must have seen like an eternity. They were thoroughly terrorized by the experience and the 14-year old was reduced to a sobbing mess who actually peed her pants at the scares that were unleashed. The 13-year old was hyperventilating from fear.

The set designs were awesome. They were rich in detail, fully thought out, wonderfully acted, and even gave me a startle or two. Of course, I was going through trying to absorb as much detail as I could but it was sensory overload. There was just way too much to take in.

After what might have been 3 or 4 of the haunts, you're given a brief respite as you exit and have to walk about 10 yards into a haunted corn maze. Here some of the props could have been beefed up as the actual mechanics were completely visible and no attempt was made to hide them. But people jumping out of the corn provided some good scares.

Soon enough, though, you were back inside what looked to be a greenhouse of sorts and some science experiments gone awry. And the terror started again. It wasn't long before the 14-year old was sobbing again with her head buried in my coat. Hey, at $32 a pop, she was going through all the haunts!

Unfortunately I didn't get to see the last haunted house because it was about this time that my wife realized she lost the car keys. Having ridden a mile long hayride and walked through a maze of haunted attractions, she had no idea where she lost them. While police and security at the attraction were excellent and beyond helpful (they even walked with my wife back through some of the haunts to try and locate them -- I was jealous since I would've gone just to get another look at the props, the hell with the keys!), it was of little use. So a $200 cab ride back down the New York State Thruway later, I found myself heading back up there with a spare key to pick up the car.

The story had a happy ending (of sorts). As we pulled back into the lot, security informed us they had actually found the keys. They were in the corn maze and my wife realized that was where she had pulled out her cellphone to call her cousin and tell him what a chicken his daughter was. Well the joke was on her (me) I guess.

Regardless, it was a haunt well worth the trip and the cost (minus the cab ride). Now haunters would be familiar with a number of the props Headless Horseman had. If you've seen any of the Transworld videos posted on the forums, you'd quickly recognize a couple of them. For example, the Pale Night Productions zombie attack was there as were some of the werewolves feeding. Cool stuff nonetheless.

From what I understand of the haunt, the owners invest heavily in their props each year from the proceeds they make. You can definitely see it.

If I can provide any tip (other than hang onto your keys), it would be "go early." When I attempted to buy the tickets online, it showed the date (October 2) was unavailable. So I called up and found out that they still had tickets available, but it was around the 9:00 p.m. time frame. Innocently enough I asked about walking around the midway while awaiting our start time and the woman said we could do that and if we wanted to get on the ride early we could probably do so as well. I then asked about getting there early enough for the 7 p.m. opening, and she said yes we could probably do that too.

So we ended up arriving around 7:00 p.m. and it took about a half hour to get the tickets, but we made it through security quickly and went right over to the hayride and got on without any problems. The lines were very short then. When we came out around 9:30 or so, which would have been around when we would've picked up our tickets, the lines were exceptionally long at that point. I wouldn't have wanted to wait then.

Security is tight at Headless Horseman (the signs say to leave your weapons in the car!). They have security patting you down and wanding you with metal detectors and the local constabulary there as back up. No flashlights, cameras, lighters, cigarettes, or backpacks are permitted in the attraction and they make you take your offending items back to your car if you try to get in anyway. I saw that happen several times.

That makes for a safe environment to enjoy the haunted rides and houses. So I can't recommend this attraction highly enough. For all that you get, and considering what other haunted houses charge in comparison, $32 a person is very cheap. Now I need to go back again to fully enjoy the show -- but I'll hold onto the keys.

A Creepy Bit of Nostalgia

Yesterday I wrote about a part of New Jersey's "haunted history" in the 1970's that led to the rise of haunted attractions at the Jersey shore. That brought back to mind another haunt, the Gingerbread Castle in Hamburg, NJ.

The Castle didn't start off as a haunted attraction. In fact it was a children's park built well before our brains were addled by instant gratification and digital excess. Ahh, simpler times. I think I might have gone here when I was very young because when I returned a few years ago there was a very real sense that I had seen it all before.

Now that it has fallen into a state of disrepair, the creepiness of the site is enhanced that much more. And it was a perfect setting for a haunted walk through which someone obviously hit on. About three years ago I found that it had been converted into a Halloween haunt and it was truly an enjoyable one. You walked through a lot of the original castle, though much of it was closed off. Even so it was a pretty extensive haunt and the actors did a good job out of scaring the bejesus out of people. That's why when I returned the following year I was surprised to find out it had closed down.

And that's how you find it today. Abandoned, dilapidated, with all the signs of the grandeur it once held, but now all silent -- perhaps even scarier than if it was a haunt again. Here's a YouTube video I found that shows a little bit of what it's like today:

And that reminded me of yet another fairy tale park called, appropriately enough, Fairy Tale Forest in  Oak Ridge, NJ. Now this park I had gone to as a child and had very fond memories of it. So when I moved to Oak Ridge with my family in the late 1990's I was very excited to take my own children. Well, all I was able to say was it wasn't like I remembered it, though it was exactly like it was back then. Nothing had changed, except it was much more rundown.

Here's a video of Fairy Tale Forest as it is, having been turned into a self storage facility:



It held fond childhood memories, but it had fallen on hard times and kids today just don't appreciate that sort of amusement that required the use of one's own imagination.

Rich

New Jersey's Haunted 70's

New Jersey was fortunate to have had a brief period in the mid-1970's to the early 1980's when haunted attractions were a major hit in the state. What started with Brigantine Castle in Brigantine soon spawned the Haunted Mansion in Long Branch and then the Haunted Castle at Six Flags Great Adventure.

According to an online history, Brigantine Castle's demise began after the seaside community limited the number of charter buses that could bring in tourists to the Castle, as well as restrictions on advertising. When a summer storm damaged the underinsured attraction, the owner closed the Castle for good in 1984.

The Haunted Mansion was born after its owner had visited Brigantine Castle and asked its owner for help in building one in Long Branch. If you view the commercials for the two attractions preserved on their individual history sites, you'll see the similarities in the promotion (even including parts of the same video). At its height, the Mansion would attract 100,000 people a week. The haunted aspect of the attraction was toned down in 1985 when the pier it was located on was dubbed "Kid's World."A gas leak in 1987 caused a fire that burned the Mansion down to its pilings.

This "golden period" of haunted houses came to a tragic end in 1984 when eight people perished in a fire at the Haunted Castle Six Flags attraction and building inspections became more strict. Built in 1979, it was destroyed by fire in 1984.

There was apparently a fourth attraction called Castle Dracula in Wildwood, but I have no recollection whatsoever of it. It opened in 1977 and also met its death as a result of fire.

Although I remember the first three attractions, it was only because of their advertising. I may have seen Castle Dracula ads too, but it doesn't shake any of the cobwebs in my brain. I never actually visited any of them, since unlike many fellow haunters, while I enjoyed Halloween as a kid it wasn't an obsession of mine until, oh, last year.

One of the ads at some point said "...and Renfield and his spiders." I'm thinking it was Brigantine Castle, but I can't find any confirmation of it. Does anybody else remember this? I recall them showing Renfield sitting in a cell shoving spiders into his mouth.

Now none of these places approached Disney's Haunted Mansion (but then again, what does?), but it seems a shame that for a state that had a brief, shining moment in permanent haunted attractions it really has nothing to show for it now.

Rich