226 S. Main Street, Crown Point, IN
Year: 2014
Another in a long string of new haunts for the Tourers this season was the Criminally Insane Haunted House (also known as Nightmare on Court Street), which is actually held in the old Crown Point courthouse, famous for holding (and not being able to hold) outlaw John Dillinger. The haunt is a fundraiser for the courthouse, and funds from it go toward its restoration, which is a very cool cause as well. The haunts begins inside the court building, where visitors are given the rules and then led inside of the "asylum", which of course has been taken over by the inmates. It then winds through actual offices and jail cells, and since the courthouse is a very old building, the atmosphere is great. The crumbling walls and old fashioned fixtures lend an air of authenticity to the full proceedings. Most of the scenes are standard ones, and include things like crazy clowns, operating rooms, and many jump out scares. Standout scenes included a surgery scene with a crazy doctor performing a grim operation on a hapless victim while old time music played from an old radio, a final huge room filled with actors coming at visitors from all sides and dead bodies hanging and dangling from various locations, and a scene where visitors were herded down a long corridor that contained real old jail cells. The corridor had a strobe at the end of it, and also had some smoke effects. As visitors walked through, actors of various types came out of the actual cells themselves and slowly walked down the corridor, both in front of and in back of visitors. Again, the real crumbling jail cells added some creepy atmosphere to the entire setup. |
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Overall, we enjoyed our visit to the Criminally Insane Haunted house, and we can add it to the list of fun haunts in Indiana, where it joins such luminaries as Haunted Hills Hospital, Lake Hills Haunted House, and Amhurst Asylum. While many of the actors were younger and some of the scares tended to be repetitive, the unusual nature of the surroundings helped push the haunt to above average in our view. We look forward to seeing what they have in store for next year!