6112 Old Porter Road, Portage, IN
year: 2013
Haunted Hills Hospital was another in a long line of brand new haunt visits for the Tourers in 2013. This haunt is located in Portage, Indiana, and we Tourers took a trip to see it as part of our Halloween night haunt visits.
The majority of the haunt is outside, and on the night we went it was rainy and windy, which made it a bit eerie for sure. The haunt begins with visitors being escorted into a waiting area and then told the rules. After the rules, visitors are told to pick one of three doorways to proceed into the rest of the haunt. Two of them are phony, but one leads inside. We have to say that the actors during the rules portion were excellent, and made something as mundane as reading the rules of the haunt most entertaining. There were two male actors, one of whom spoke with a high pitched voice and the other who was silent, as well as a creepy nurse with a bandaged face, who simply hung around in the background making odd, jerky movements and seemingly existing in a world of her own. She was highly entertaining even before we went into the haunt itself. As mentioned, most of the haunt was outdoors, but numerous scenes were made up took like like they were indoors. Each of the scenes was well decorated, with numerous props and at least one live actor in each. In addition to the outside scenes there was an elevator portion with a creepy elevator man who took you down to the basement, and a large area which looks liked a surgery, where unfortunate "patients" were being operated on by the resident doctors. While the sets were decent (and were well done, given that most of them were outdoors, it was the actors that really made this haunt for us. As mentioned, there were quite a few of them, usually two in each room, and all of theme were into what they were doing and made a point of trying to scare or to be creepy. There were several clever actors, including one guy who was hanging from a wooden beam looking like a moss-covered dummy, only to come alive as we passed, and another guy who looked exactly like we was hanging by a chain that was around his neck. However, the chain was just cleverly twisted, as some unfortunate girls in front of us found out as they passed by him! Also, there was a creepy little guy in a skull mask who jumped out at us in one scene, then followed at a short distance behind us, muttering to himself and laughing at our impending doom. It was hilarious and a bit disturbing at the same time. Finally, we have to again mention the creepy nurse. Not only was she with us at the very beginning of the haunt, she kept cropping up all over the place as we went through the haunt. The really cool thing about her was that she never actually interacted with us. Instead, she just turned up and walked around making these odd, jerky movements. Again, it was as if she would have been doing that even if no one was watching her. she was simply excellent, especially since she didn't even have to get in our way or in our faces in order to "sell" her act. When you have been to as many haunts as we have, you tend to see the same kinds of things over and over. While we have seen many nurse characters in haunts, we have never seen one like this. It only takes on clever thing to make a haunt enjoyable for us, and at Haunted Hills, the nurse was it! Overall, this was a very fun an enjoyable haunt. There were several clever scares, some excellent sets, and some very good acting (especially from those actors pretending to be props). The length was approximately 10 minutes which, for the $5 price is really quite good. It also had a good, old fashioned haunt feel - not overly hyped up and not overly reliant on elaborate props or animatronics - just good, old fashioned weirdness. We enjoyed the experience despite the rain, and we look forward to hitting this one again in years to come. |
Commentary
|