Midway to Madness at All Saint’s Lunatic Asylum

Hello Readers! Happy Halfway to Halloween!

Usually, Halfway to Halloween isn’t that big a deal. You’ll make a few fun social media posts. You may begin or continue your countdown to the big day. Then you go on with your day, knowing you have a ways to go until you can enter a Haunt again.

But this year, we decided to celebrate for real with a trip to Apple Valley, California, to enter All Saints Lunatic Asylum. I have wanted to go to All Saints for a very long time, mostly because of their website. This website has a back story written for every character in the asylum, from the owner to the patients. It has cannibalistic doctors, ghosts, and creepy masks of all kinds. I definitely encourage you to read it for yourself.

A storyline is one of the most important parts of a haunt, even if the guests never hear the whole thing. If a haunt is a body, the story is the skeleton. The skeleton dictates where the flesh will go and sometimes what size it will be. Likewise, the storyline dictates what types of rooms and characters should be in a haunt, from the entry hall to the smallest picture on the wall. The characters should have their own stories too, to varying depths. It helps the actors make decisions on how their characters should act when confronted with different types of guests.

But I will get back to my story, the story of the Damsels’ visit to All Saints Lunatic Asylum. After traveling the 3 hours from Las Vegas to Apple Valley, we set the GPS for All Saints. I had been hoping that it would be out in the middle of nowhere, since I had heard that Apple Valley was a very small town. It was not in the middle of nowhere, but it was in its own building, which always bodes well for sets. It also had a gorgeous white hearse parked out in front.

We were greeted by a couple of creepy characters who claimed that they had no idea how the hearse had gotten there, and proceeded to usher us inside.

The theme for their Halfway to Halloween event was Midway to Madness. They portrayed this clever theme by decorating the line with old circus-type posters. There was a tattooed woman with a haunted doll talking through a shadow box. She let us talk to him, too, but he was not in the mood to reply. So we settled for a picture.

There was one group ahead of us in line, since we had gotten there so early. But while we were waiting for the haunt to start, the creepy creatures were happy to entertain us. One of them even let me hold a giant hammer! He had a mask that made me wonder if he was one of the patients I had read about on the website. I admit, I was too amused by the hammer to remember to ask for the background. We were shown into an anteroom, where a few nurses asked us harmless questions and one let us pick from a tarot deck. She told me I would “find love” that evening, but I don’t think she realized I would fall in love with her haunt!

Then we entered the doors… and onto the review.

Sets:

The inside of the haunt was amazing. The first thing I noticed was that each of the rooms was incredibly detailed. So detailed, in fact, that they had me peering through the darkness to try to see more! One room, for example, had dolls on almost every inch of the walls. Another had puppets hanging from the ceiling, crowding the room so that it was impossible to know which side the actor would be coming from. The story on the website mentioned a chapel haunted by a ghost girl, and the chapel was there. They made several mentions of a graveyard, and sure enough, it appeared, crumbling tombstones and all. They used enough dark hallways to disorient even me, with the blinder lights flashing from the sides. Blinder lights are used to kill your dark vision so that dark hallways are even harder to see. Usually, they are placed above the door at the start of a dark hallway or maze. In All Saints Lunatic Asylum, they were placed at strategic places throughout the entire haunt. This bit of genius had me disoriented the entire way, often not knowing which way to go next.

The rooms all had the air of dinginess that you would expect from an abandoned asylum that is being carelessly renovated. The paint on the walls is peeling or water-damaged, and the pictures are dusty. But all of this is carefully placed to cultivate a story. I read all of the character bios in the car, and I’m pretty sure that all of the rooms mentioned in the bios were in the haunt.

One extra bit of decor that stood out was not part of the sets. It was in the restroom at the end. The walls were painted with a wonderfully gory Asylum of All Saints scene. Every side you looked at had some kind of death. It was not painted with a realism that would horrify so much that you wouldn’t want to use the restroom. More to a cartoonish level of macabre that definitely amused this haunt aficionado.

Acting:

This is the part of the haunt that stood out the most to me. I have been in haunts where the actors are encouraged to make up their lines and haunts where they are required to stick to a script. I have been to some places where they try to interact with the guests, but only have a small set of lines to use. These actors were a step above the rest. While I was walking super slow and trying to study every bit of the set, The Dragon was bantering with the actors. And they were bantering back! She had an entire conversation with the cannibal doctor about which parts they could cut off! And each room was just as intense.

The Dragon: I loved being able to banter with several of the actors, the varying roles all played along with me, either as a “one of us” interaction or “that’s nice, honey” tone, depending on the characters they were playing.

None of the actors rushed us through because they ran out of scripted lines. The screamers screamed and moaned and struggled, but every character with the ability to have a voice was talking to us! One actor, playing a ringmaster, held himself so still that I debated on whether he was real until I was within touching distance! If I were giving out haunt trophies, this one would get one for most interactive. It was so much fun that we want to go back in October to see the regular full season experience.

Also, this is the only haunt I have ever seen with a real musician in the middle of it. She made such haunting atmospheric music without ever breaking her ghostly persona. And the fact that the music was live made it unexpected and beautiful.

Here is one of my favorite Line Actors, (Pictured with The Dragon) since I couldn’t take pics of the ones inside.

Theme:

The haunt definitely laid out their theme on the website and seemed to stick to it, for the most part. Every part of the original haunt was at least thematically adjacent, and where it departed from it, the stories picked up the slack. And guests who don’t care to read the stories, nothing was so far out of theme that it would shock them out of the mood. The asylum had all of the rooms you would expect in a vintage asylum scene. There was a dentist-type chair, an operating room, patient rooms, and even an area for dead bodies. The chapel and the graveyard seemed a little bit too ornate for the rest of the asylum. I would have expected something a bit more sparse. But they did carry their own morbid charm in their ornate qualities.

It was made clear in the bios I read that none of the nurses and doctors of the asylum were what anyone would call particularly sane themselves. The actors definitely kept up to that theme. They waved around parts of corpses, charged us with wide eyes accented by the makeup. The makeup was done with such artistry that it was neither overdone nor too subtle. It gave the idea that all of the characters were definitely a bit out of touch with reality, if not out of touch with the mortal coil.

My only comment here was that the midway theme, placed in to make Halfway to Halloween its own special event, seemed a bit out of place. The actors were given circus lines to work into their repertoire, and a couple were dressed in circus costumes. Honestly, I can’t say whether I wanted the theme to be more prominent or I wanted it to stick to the lobby. Although I can say it does make me want to go back and see it in October, in its purest form.

The Dragon: I can’t remember the circus theme standing out, now that might sound negative… However, the reason it didn’t stand out was that it felt more like some patients were or believed they were part of a circus. It didn’t feel like we walked through a door and found a circus in the middle of an asylum, which to me was a big plus. It still felt like a haunted, insane asylum with interesting characters who have run amok in there.

Scare Factor:

There were actors in this haunt that startled me. There were some with truly unsettling lines. So while I wasn’t scared per se, the average guest would have no chance. I even had some proof of that in the screams we heard from the group ahead of us and behind us. One guest even fell out of the exit door, she was trying so hard to get away. I was too busy being fascinated by the awesome sets and actors to be afraid. This haunt would definitely get high marks for scaring the average person.

All Saints Lunatic Asylum is an amazing haunted attraction. It met all of my hopes and more. I wanted to go through with the lights on and go through in October with a crowd. I wanted to ask them if they allowed guest actors.

They also have a merch room at the end with everything from hand towels to wallets to posters and hair clips. I would hazard a guess that some of them were made by a local artist and sold on consignment. Definite plus on giving back to their small community if that is the case.