While California is still the world center for haunts, Pennsylvania is perhaps the country’s most underappreciated haunt state. With majorlocations in the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia metro areas and variousothersites scattered throughout the state, Pennsylvania is rapidly becoming worthy of a standalone October trip for haunt fans.
Typically avoiding the intensity of a Heretic or Blackout experience—save the quasi-extreme Scarehouse: Basement near Pittsburgh—Pennsylvania haunts have tended toward light touch: fingers grazing your shoulder, or an unseen hand grabbing your ankle. For now at least, this can function both for the haunt industry and certain haunt patrons as a welcome middle ground between marquee no-touch haunts like Halloween Horror Nights and the bespoke torture techniques at the opposite end of the spectrum. Here are two such middle-ground haunts in the Philadelphia area.
Pennhurst Asylum
Location is Pennhurst’s strongest asset. To reach the haunt, located thirty miles outside of Philadelphia, guests drive deep into the woods along an unlit road. After you park in a clearing, you must walk deeper into the woods along a gravel path sparsely illuminated by a string of lights and a small wood fire. It would be beautiful if it weren’t menacing. At last you emerge onto the campus of the Asylum itself. A dozen old brick buildings, long fallen into disrepair and disuse, stand scattered in the forest. These facilities had served for decades as a mental institution, yet several years ago they were repurposed into one of Eastern Pennsylvania’s best haunts.
There are four attractions at Pennhurst, which can be purchased individually or as packages. The first three are walkthrough haunts: Pennhurst Asylum (a hospital), Dungeon of Lost Souls (a continuation of the hospital), and Containment (underground tunnels). The fourth, Mayflower After Dark, is a non-haunt opportunity to tour one of the old buildings with a flashlight. Movement through the first three spaces is affected by light contact from the patients and doctors, while guests proceed through the fourth unmolested.
The three haunt components have a lot of thematic continuity: all deal with mistreated patients, medical abuses, and scientific experimentation. This makes Pennhurst Asylum and Dungeon of Lost Souls in particular difficult to differentiate. Guests advance from the aboveground hospital to science-fictional depravities in the Containment tunnels belowground, which lends the experience a sense of narrative progression.
The actors, whether victimized patients or victimizing doctors, were aggressive toward guests without being overly physical. They routinely followed after me after I thought I had left them behind. Rooms were richly decorated with ghastly medical paraphernalia, and the art direction throughout was impressive. Strobe lights and extreme darkness were employed not just to hide an impending monster but to deprive us of sight for an unnervingly long time. I walked in darkness for what seemed like forever, hands waving in front of me to avoid running into another person or wall, until a performer stashed in a compartment in the ceiling let his dangling hand stroke my hair. My waving hands couldn’t guard against that sensation. And staging a scare above was an effective strategy for immersion: we grew to understand the Pennhurst ghouls attack from all directions. Altogether these three attractions took standard haunt themes and techniques yet executed them very well throughout.
Mayflower After Dark, an optional add-on after the haunt portions, is also worth a visit for just a few extra dollars. You walk through an actual undecorated asylum dormitory with a flashlight. No performers interrupt your tour. Despite what Pennhurst claims, you’re not really seeing the rooms as they’ve stood untouched since the 1980s. Instead, you also glimpse the build-up of decades of graffiti and spray paint. Yet in a strange way this palimpsest mirrors the incorporation of a haunt into the Asylum. Art is laid atop a history of real terror and fear.
Terror Behind the Walls at Eastern State Penitentiary
The massive stone walls of the Eastern State Penitentiary enclose an improbable castle-like space in the middle of Philadelphia. Though its byzantine corridors and clusters of cells once held criminals like Al Capone, they currently house Terror Behind the Walls, another atmospheric and mild-contact haunt.
There are six distinct haunt areas within. Some relate to the prison theme, such as the zombified prisoner area, Lock Down. Others do not, such as Blood Yard, an odd mishmash of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Cannibal Holocaust. Guests have the option to signal they consent to being touched by wearing a glow-stick necklace. The difference between touch and no-touch was minimal, however, as the contact was infrequent and far from intense.
Two things set Eastern State apart from its competition. The first is their implementation of side rooms and alternate pathways which certain guests are selected to go down. At one point a man in front of me was plucked from the group and directed through a hole in the wall, where he emerged onto a kind of rubbery sheet cake of human viscera and eyeballs. After he had scampered over that, he was filtered back into the procession of guests.
The second difference is the Hex Challenge. For an upcharge—reaching a steep $85 on Saturday nights—guests can join a small group that partakes in mini-challenges prior to each haunt area. With six haunts plus six brief escape rooms, there’s a lot to do. Yet the scare factor and the difficulty factor in these was quite low. In one challenge our group had to find an item hidden in a pile of dirt; we did so immediately. In another we had to win a shell game conducted by a crazy inmate two times out of three; we did so easily. An ironic disengagement developed in my group because no one was frightened. Once a challenge was accomplished, we were filtered back into the haunt line at the start of each maze. The Hex Challenge is excellent is theory but unstimulating in execution.
The general narrative appeared to be human special ops forces sent in to fight militarized zombie prisoner forces. But there were enough deviations from this theme—including the cannibals of Blood Yard, as well as neon-green-and-orange monsters in Quarantine: 4D—to obscure the zombie prison break theme. The set decoration, for its part, was reasonably sparse. Eastern State’s chief strategy is to count on the creepiness of the site rather than add to it.
Conclusion
Pennhurst Asylum and Eastern State demonstrate a welcome opportunity to suffuse haunts with the color of local history and the eeriness of the half-forgotten past. The horror film trope of building a house on ancient Indian burial grounds recognizes this power of location. Wouldn’t it be even more potent if that past were real?
Pennhurst Asylum runs through November 4th. Eastern State runs through November 11th.
Eliot became smitten with haunts after attending ALONE in 2015. He is fortunate to think about fear for a living. As a doctoral candidate in Film and Media at UC Berkeley, he teaches courses on horror films and sluggishly writes a dissertation on fear in horror films and haunts.
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