Eloise Asylum Review (2026)

Eloise’s website has all the pertinent information to make your visit as easy and enjoyable as possible. With ticket purchasing, season calendar, and upcoming events, they have you covered. GPS gets you where you need to be, but once you’re in the general vicinity, the beautiful yet eerie structure that is Eloise lets you know you’re in the right place.

Just inside the gate, staff greet you and help you to an available parking spot. The parking lot and the rest of the grounds are well maintained and well lit. This year, they upgraded from generator lights in the parking lot to permanent lights, making it easier to see in the dark and opening up a few more parking spaces.

Besides the amazing staff of Eloise, who are always willing to help, the property has fantastic signage to point you to the ticket booth, line entrance, and midway area.

Once you’ve passed all your tests and you’ve been mentally cleared for discharge and find your way back to your car, exiting the property can be a little confusing, but as long as you follow the signs and parking lot crew, leaving can be a breeze.

Standing outside of Eloise provides you with an eerie entrance into the insane wonders hidden inside its doors. As you enter through the narrow entrance and into the corridors of Eloise, a sense of uneasiness sweeps over you.

The fog starts to settle in; you begin to see flashing, flickering lights, and the ground below you starts to shake; by this time, you realize it’s already too late. You’re lost in the rooms and halls of The Asylum. Old bottles, wet specimens, and files upon files of patient information litter the shelves and floors. And the smell. The smell of the sick and demented people who ran through those halls made you feel as though you could go insane yourself.

Although the story never really establishes a clear plot for The Basement, it becomes apparent that this is where many failed experiments happened. With Mad Scientist meets Sci-Fi vibes, the alien-like beings, containment chambers, mutant creatures, and massive monsters leave you creeping around every corner, hoping to get a chance to run from the next thing that wants to eat you.

When it comes to special effects at Eloise, there were no corners cut when designing these two attractions. By far, the special effects are what set Eloise apart from other attractions in the area. With state-of-the-art animatronics, theatrical lighting, heavy use of fog, unsettling sound effects, and a lot of video effects, Eloise makes sure to use every trick in the book.

While you fulfill your stay in The Asylum, you encounter a mix of highly detailed props and actual asylum relics that create movie-quality scenes that are complete from floor to ceiling. As you wander the halls, the screams of patients echo along with the shrieking sounds of alarms, and surveillance videos show patients still locked in their cells. While The Asylum has some great animatronics, like electric chairs and zombies, The Basement is where they really shine.

From giant monsters, mutated patients, and alien-like creatures, The Basement is filled with animatronics that will make your skin crawl. Mix those with the defining sounds of reactors and machinery, a sprinkle of disorienting lights and fog, and The Basement’s special effects, and you get something not to be missed.

As you make your way through the Midway or stand in the queue line, the creatures of Eloise wander the grounds and keep you company. Don’t feel blue, or do! Either way, Pigeon the Clown will be there with you. Think you can run?! Hector will catch you with ease with his long, long legs, and punish you with his bat. The Shadow Man will chase you down with his chainsaw or send shivers down your spine with his Aztec Death Whistle.

Inside, the Asylum is at capacity not only with patients, but of course, the doctors and nurses who are unfortunately trapped and forced to walk these halls. There were wide varieties among both; personal space is not a thing, as they don’t hesitate to get in your face and try to get you to stay with them forever.

The Basement has fewer actors, but the ones who call it home played their parts beautifully. A nurse welcomes you and directs you to meet the doctor, who shows you some of his greatest creations. As we walked throughout, we found a patient who had been taken for experiments and was left with her skin to rot, as well as a mutated patient who looked like something straight out of John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. We also saw a scientist in a full-body suit whose helmet had broken; his face was mangled and deformed. He screamed, “Help! My skin! It burns!” It wasn’t long after we were offered the same fate.

Most of the characters we crossed were in full costumes head to toe, along with detailed makeup or hyper-realistic masks. We did cross a few where their street clothes showed through, or bright new shoes that detracted from the traditional look.

A heavy weight of uncertainty settles in as you approach the menacing structure, knowing the history and the unspeakable “treatments” that went on here. That in itself creates a sense of fear that only adds to the scare factor as you navigate the remaining grounds of Eloise.

Once you enter The Asylum, that uncertainty becomes a reality as you are greeted by madness-stricken patients running amok and hiding around every corner. The scares in the Asylum hit hard, fast, and from all directions. Relying more on actors than animatronics, the use of misdirection, startles, and suspense, along with the attack on your senses, there is definitely no lack of scares.

The opposite is true for The Basement. The Basement relies heavily on animatronic scares over actors. This took away from the scare factor for us because of the “automated amusement” style attraction, making the scares more predictable and easier to spot beforehand.

That’s not to say there weren’t great scare tactics in The Basement. From phobias like darkness and the feeling of claustrophobia to spiders and giant monsters, there is no shortage in The Basement.

It took 23 minutes to escape the patient-ravaged halls of The Asylum and only 12 minutes to break out of the failed experiment chambers that is The Basement. With a total 35-minute adventure and a General Admission ticket price of $35, that leaves the MPD (Minutes Per Dollar) at 1, which is right where we like to see it.

One thing to know beforehand: if you plan to park on the premises, the parking fee is $15 if you buy online or $20 at the gate. Besides General Admission, Eloise offers a VIP option that includes the Haunt, parking, and also 10% off your purchases at the Merch Booth. Along with the haunt, Eloise offers Escape Rooms, multiple photo opportunities (including an immersive pumpkin patch-themed area), a permanent outdoor stage for live entertainment, multiple food trucks, and special events throughout the season.

There is no shortage of things to do when you check into Eloise, and who knows, you may never leave…