Hotel of Horror and Altered Nightmares in Saylorsburg, PA are 2 of the best haunted attractions in the country under 1 roof. In my mind they redefined the genre and owned their own brand of horror in a way that no one else can. If you like good haunts with a legitimate devotion to creative haunting techniques and don’t go here you are an idiot. You should do both of the attractions.

The secret is that their actors cultivate complex characters and perform them in each room. You’ll experience high startle scares here but you would really be screwing up if you didn’t linger a bit in each room to let them do their entire spiel for you. No one else does this in this way to my knowledge.

Hotel of Horror and now Pennhurst are the only 2 haunted attractions that I do twice each year. Once for work, once for me. That should tell you something about the quality level. When my job here is done those are the 2 that I put my personal party time at.

You can check out their blog to get a feel for some of the characters you will find in the house.

I attended on opening day this year and had a great time. I have in the past given Altered Nightmares the lead. This year Hotel of Horror was was the stronger of the 2. This may have been due to it being opening night. Both are still phenomenal attractions. I plan to go back to see how it evolves over the season. I’m sure that this will tighten up quickly since the energy of each actor clearly told me that they all were top notch. Some of the people in here were very on point and intense.

I have to suggest that they bring back 2 actors in the Altered Nightmares slow strobe room. When we went through there was only 1 person in there attacking us. I think that this room needs 2 actors making sounds and attacking like it had last year. The actor in there was phenomenal but it was noticeably less powerful to us but you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t gone last year.

The decor for the voodoo theme was very well done but it seemed to stop partially through the haunt. I appreciated the attention to detail in the voodoo rooms and thought it was interesting but I’m not sure the scope was wide enough to encapsulate all of the types of actor genres present in the haunt. That said, this is an example of the type of out of the box creativity that these guys will try that few others have the balls to attempt. You certainly aren’t going to find your run of the mill haunt stereotypes here. Everything is done in a different way than anyone else.

Hotel of Horror has my wholehearted recommendation and is one of the gems in my “Best of” pantheon. The show is brutal, creative, and unlike anywhere else. We saw some opening day jitters but let’s face got dam reality – this should be a yearly tradition in every true haunt fan’s travels.

DO. THIS. ONE.