Our Visit to Halloween Nights at Eastern State Penitentiary
Date: 9/21/2024
Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Gone are the days of “Terror Behind the Walls”, as Eastern State Penitentiary ushers in a new era of spooky fun known as Halloween Nights. Halloween Nights at Eastern State Penitentiary possesses no shortage of thrills and chills! This “Halloween Festival of Epic Proportions” is a SPOOKTACULAR place to celebrate the spooky season. Featuring five haunted attractions, scare zones, several themed bars/lounges, live dance performances, smores, light shows, and much more… you’ll truly find something for everyone at Halloween Nights!
This is our squad's first time having the pleasure of experiencing Halloween Nights, and we have to say, we were thoroughly impressed! Halloween Nights excellently blends together standard haunted attraction offerings with festival-esque experiences to truly cater to a vast variety of spooky lovers! A unique feature included in your Halloween Nights ticket is the ability to come and stay as long as you’d like! This means if you want to venture through your favorite attraction(s) five times, go right ahead! Or if you want to kick back by a private fire pit to roast smores or enjoy some adult beverages at one of the several themed bars/lounges, then have at it! Halloween Nights allows patrons to enjoy the offerings at their own pace & puts an emphasis on ensuring their patrons truly have a frightfully fun experience!
For first time patrons to Eastern State Penitentiary, the majority of parking is located offsite at the nearby Philadelphia Zoo. Be sure to purchase your parking pass online to help save yourself a few bucks. There’s a shuttle bus that’ll transport you to and from the Penitentiary! Tickets are available via timed ticketing slots, so be sure to purchase online to guarantee entry into the festival. Our squad spent about 3.5 hours onsite at Halloween Nights, so come prepared for a full evening's worth of spooky fun!
As you approach the campus of the Eastern State Penitentiary you can’t help but feel chills, as the towering Penitentiary walls certainly create an unnerving atmosphere. Eastern State Penitentiary is housed across 10 acres and pictures truly don’t do it justice to depict just how massive this place is! Once inside the ominous Penitentiary walls, you’re immediately immersed into the eerie yet electrifying atmosphere. After passing through security and redeeming your tickets, you’re set forth to begin your experience at Halloween Nights.
Your evening commences with a rather important choice… Mayor Margrave will question if you want to “opt-in” for a scarier experience! If you choose to wear a glow necklace, you may be touched/grabbed by the scare actors, sent into hidden passageways, and even temporarily separated from your group. Opting in for the scarier experience certainly makes your experience a bit more interactive. Our squad certainly wasn’t passing up on the scarier experience and we can attest that you’ll be sent down secret corridors and subjected to a more interactive experience. By opting in, if you end up experiencing an attraction more than once, you’re almost guaranteed to have a vastly different haunt experience each time through!
Halloween Nights possesses five haunted attractions Big Top Terror, Delirium, Machine Shop, Nightmares, and The Crypt! 4 of the 5 attractions were rather short experiences lasting ~4-5 minutes. The Crypt was a notably longer experience lasting ~8-10 minutes. While the attractions may have been short, they each were action-packed with high-end special effects, elegantly crafted scenes, relentless & witty ghouls, and a fair share of spine-tingling startles! While we don’t want to give away too many specifics, we do want to highlight our favorite parts of each attraction.
Big Top Terror: Shout-out to the life-size Puppeteer, this fellow was insanely cool, yet quite freakish! We also enjoyed the “Blade Thrower” fellow, who certainly gave one of our members an interactive experience that sent chills down our spines.
Delirium: Put your 3D glasses on and you’ll be immersed into a trippy world of spooks and surprises! This 3D attraction may have the most eye-popping scenes we’ve encountered anywhere in our travels. We especially loved the vortex tunnel! Boy was that a mind-bending experience.
Machine Shop: We have to give kudos to the entire Machine Shop cast for being intense with their engagements & delivering several startles. We loved that the Machine Shop also featured a lot of the original Penitentiary… The Penitentiary is majorly creepy all by itself and they used that to their advantage throughout the Machine Shop!
Nightmares: Easily our favorite attraction of the evening, Nightmares was worthy of our squad venturing through two different times! Each time we received a different experience, as the actors were able to easily change up their engagements to still deliver hair-raising startles. Right from the get-go you venture down a dimly strobe-lit hallway which certainly creates suspense. As you venture further into Nightmares, actors begin appearing out of nowhere, rolling past you on their skates! Super creepy! We really loved the attention to detail throughout the Forest and Swamp scenes, truly chefs kiss! Special kudos to The Dentist and his assistant for providing several of our members with cruel and anxiety-provoking dental work! We also enjoyed our special anatomy lesson with the doctor!
The Crypt: By far the longest of the attractions at Halloween Nights, The Crypt carries an eerie and unnerving atmosphere from start to finish. The elegantly crafted cemetery scenes lacked no shortage of detail, as we felt fully immersed into an abandoned cemetery. Be forewarned, The Crypt is anything but empty, as creatures of all sorts are lurking in the darkness!
At different points throughout the evening we had the opportunity to enjoy most of the side attractions that Halloween Nights has to offer. We’ll highlight those experiences below!
Bizarre Bar: Grab yourself an adult beverage and kick back to enjoy a live circus-esque performance. We even had a balloon artist make us a balloon animal!
Pumpkin Plaza: Here we enjoyed some incredibly delicious French Toast Bites while enjoying the live dance performance from The Boogie Monsters. Be sure to snag a group picture or two at one of the several photo-ops!
Smores and Lore: Roast some marshmallows by the fire while you enjoy ghost stories! Truly a great way to decompress in between haunted attractions!
The Fair Chance Beer Garden: Enjoy a cold adult beverage, consume some scrumptious pizza, and take in a little dose of history! That’s right, you can enjoy a 20-minute self-guided audio tour of the Penitentiary!
Hospital Flashlight Tour: For $12 you can snag tickets to partake in a 20-minute guide-led flashlight tour of the Hospital Block at Eastern State Penitentiary!
The Bloodline Lounge: This vampire-themed cocktail lounge features bloody-terrific beverages and live entertainment throughout the evening! Not to mention the lounge is elegantly furnished with all sorts of spooky decor!
Kaleidoscope Hall: Take in a projection light show inside one of Eastern State Penitentiary’s most picturesque cell blocks! It was truly a jaw-dropping lightshow spectacular! Special shout-out to the actor within this area, the reflective costume being worn was incredible!
The Speakeasy at Al Capone’s Cell: This prohibition-themed cocktail lounge is for VIP ticket holders only. Grab an adult beverage and kick back to enjoy the several lounge singers who truly put on a Broadway level performance! Definitely an experience you don’t want to miss out on!
Halloween Tribute Store: If you’re merch lovers like our squad is, then be sure to swing through the store to snag some Halloween Nights memorabilia! They had all sorts of spooky themed items available for purchase!
We have to give a major shout-out to Kiani, the Marketing Manager at Halloween Nights, for being an excellent host for our crew! It was an absolute pleasure speaking with Kiani to learn more about the Halloween Nights experience. We truly didn’t know what to expect going into our evening, and boy were we pleasantly surprised with the experience offered. If you’re looking for your traditional haunted attraction experience, Halloween Nights may not be exactly what you’re looking for (largely due to the short duration of the attractions & festival-esque atmosphere). However, if you’re looking for an event that combines both haunts and a wide array of other spooky themed offerings, then Halloween Nights is exactly what you’re looking for. This “Halloween Festival of Epic Proportions” truly far exceeded our expectations and delivered an incredibly SPOOKY FUN experience that we’re sure to talk about for haunt seasons to come! Job well done to the entire Halloween Nights crew, we certainly can’t wait to visit y’all again in seasons to come! Be sure to check out Halloween Nights, you won’t be disappointed!
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