We’ve all seen unusual venues for haunts. Old prisons, former asylums, mansions or estates, wineries, and breweries, even boats and caves. The Haunted Hydro is the only one we know of that hangs its haunted hat in a decommissioned hydroelectric power plant.

Now 35 years in, the Hydro underwent a seismic change last season with an ownership change of hands as legendary founder, creator, owner, actor, and ringleader “Crazy” Bob Turner retired. This was our first trip back after the transition.

We took on the Extreme experience. The new bright white shirts they gave us to mark us as targets stayed in that condition for about two minutes. We got drizzled and smeared with blood, pelted with soil, separated, touched, and subjected to extended interactions with gonzo actors.

You will get goopy if you choose to go Extreme! Put your hair up and do not wear a hat, jewelry, a watch, nice clothes or shoes, etc. Leave your glasses in the car or, as we did, take them off and hold them above your head if you sense a sludge-fest moment is on the way. Check out the photos to see just how messy it can get.

This year, the attraction is semi-broken-up (no queues or signage, minimal if any border lines) into three parts that make a more or less seamless walkthrough. Fog Harbor is mostly an outside trail with structures sprinkled throughout. The Void, billed as a no-rhyme-or-reason voyage inside the mind of the Hydro’s curator, sends visitors inside the plant. Wasteland is a toxic waste site wending its way beneath the towering walls.

So… how was it? Is the new Hydro in good hands or claws? All shall be revealed!

The actors presented themselves as an entertaining, diverse, highly energized ensemble capable of holding together a quite long (nearly 40 minutes) walkthrough.

Some were funny, some were frightening, and many were both funny and frightening. This was a super interactive cast, probably more so because we had the Extreme pass. It started right away when the very first actor, the envoy of Fog Harbor, kept us engaged for almost five minutes (!). Along with another ghastly creep, they excitedly laid the ground rules, threw us up against a wall, told us we had zero chance of surviving what was to come, and greased us up with seemingly buckets of blood.

No doubt we got to spend more time with, and received more attention from, the Hydro denizens because of our Extreme pass. But we also saw the actors interacting with non-Extreme guests, just not to the superlative degree we experienced. The additional encounter time and interaction with the cast included lots of entertaining speechifying. Sometimes we find this sort of thing just tedious and repetitious, but they kept it fast-paced and varied here, delivered in a range of weird accents from whispers to screams.

A freaky phantom and its pigheaded buddy accosted us in the graveyard. A squabbling hillbilly couple argued about whether the hubby didn’t buy enough toilet paper. The wife, Claudine, underscored her argument by throwing poop (wet dirt) on us to close the scene. A brain-damaged yokel warned us not to touch their trailer. The gargoyle king’s lackey couldn’t believe we didn’t see his highness right in front of us. To be fair it was foggy and the prop was set up on a roof, but they didn’t want to hear excuses!

A gas-masked goon forced the male in our group into a chair and told the woman to go fetch a beer. A noisily hacking scientist wanted to turn us into a cockroach and a shrimp. A bride on roller skates roamed the hallways in search of an eligible bachelor. A hyperactive skeleton figure threatened to use our fingers and toes as toothpicks. A bat-wielding psycho with a great manic laugh wiped the blood off their Louisville slugger onto our necks.

And so it went, with each new creep piling on the enjoyable weirdness… to an Extreme extent.

Costuming efforts ran the gamut from basic to elaborate, street clothes to fully decked out. The two queue actors we ran into had neat head-to-toe looks and creepy eye applications – one with piercing contact lenses, the other with an unblinking bug eye.

We noted both makeup and masks for facial appearances. Makeup ranged from simple bloody or ghostly looks to some nasty visages like a face full of lesions. Masks went from Burn Man’s droopy, wrinkly fright-face to the spazzy skeleton who paired a lovely fanged skull with an exposed rib cage. Claudine’s hillbilly husband repeatedly brandished his cartoonishly floppy hand to hilarious effect. Taken as a whole, we saw a fairly strong costuming game.

The Haunted Hydro is located in Fremont, Ohio, in the northwest corner of the state near Toledo. GPS did not fail us and it’s easy to see from the street. Parking attendants directed us to a spot in the grass lot. The $5 parking fee benefits the Ohio Safety Team, a community organization in Fremont.

Ticketing was signposted and easily found from the parking area, as was the attraction entrance from the ticket stand. From there, it was a straight path through all the attractions which, as we noted earlier, are back to back to-back without separate lines and entrances. We did need to be (re)directed once or twice inside the attraction when the path did not seem clear.

We found the trail quite easy to walk. Inside the plant was just a bit trickier, with some step-ups/downs and inclines to navigate.

The Hydro has a good website with lots of information, as well as a solid social media presence. Timed ticketing is in place.

The mighty power plant walls loomed as we approached, looking something like a medieval fortress. Unfortunately, the giant half-skull set atop a wall that peeks out over the parking area was not lit up this time. We look forward to seeing that thing!

The attraction entrance looked perhaps a little plainer than we’ve seen elsewhere this season, but the two queue actors helped make up for it. They delighted in freaking out the waiting patrons. The pair verbally busted our chops and gave us our first taste of the dripping blood treatment.

The Haunted Hydro is one of those places where scene follows scene without a real storyline and there’s nothing wrong with such an approach. It does that very well. The presence and atmosphere of the plant itself, coupled with convincing sets, frantic action, crazy actor interactions, convincing performances, and the continuous walkthrough of the three sections without stops and starts, all led to a high immersion rate.

We did not have much time to stop and think or question what was going on. That’s usually when immersion suffers. We went through only a few dead or slow spots, the worst of which was an extended area of going through hanging cloth strips in The Void.

At last, escaping via a culvert, the exit led to an extras-rich midway with a concessions stand, merch booth, axe throwing, tarot card reading booth, and an excellent memorabilia museum. They’ve stuffed the museum trailer to the gills with relics from the haunt’s 35-year lifespan. We saw props, t-shirts and hats, posters, newspaper articles, memorials for actors who have passed, and more. It’s an intriguing walk down haunt memory lane.

The Haunted Hydro maintains the haunt version of a balanced monster cereal breakfast: actor-centric and effects-laden. Each section boasted some impressive FX work.

The Fog Harbor trail had us tip-toeing in and out of shanty town shacks, traipsing through a trailer park surrounded by chain link fencing, and whistling by a graveyard filled with caskets and gravestones. An animatronic giant did its best to ram down a huge door it was stuck behind. A hearse, a wagon, and other rundown transports formed a vehicular graveyard of sorts. We dodged Venus flytraps in a greenhouse and admired savage werewolf figures.

In The Void, we evaded a skeletal hell hound animatronic – until an actor made us go back and kneel before it to prove our worth. A room decorated with runes and symbols exuded occult menace. A spring-action croc snapped at us in the taxidermy room.

Toxic barrels made a maze like path in Wasteland. Besides walking around the massive, aged walls of the power plant for great views of this more than 100-year-old edifice, the most notable features here were deep pits in the ground. Some were outfitted with skeletons. One of these might have been Timmy. They told us he had been down there for, oh, a few months. Sadly for Timmy, Lassie had not come to the rescue.

Droning music formed the backbone of the soundtrack, most audible in The Void. Many of the sound effects were made or facilitated by the actors – banging weapons, employing a shock stick, making vocal noises, etc. The most prominent aspect of the lighting was a solid use of saturated lighting, each scene set off with one primary color.

Our personal space was compromised as soon as we stepped in the door. An immediate attacker bum rushed us literally the second we entered and ordered us against the wall. From then on, it was fears-a-go-go as we marched in the hit parade of phobias and frights.

Giant bugs. Being buried alive. Forced to crouch through a claustrophobic crawlspace. Assaulted by “shock therapy” sparkers. Unseen hands grabbing at our legs. Greenhouse ghillie ambush. Full-contact chainsaw sports.

The Extreme Pass certainly greased the fear gears. We were fair game and didn’t know who would do what to us, when or where. Plentiful hiding spots, effective distraction set-ups, and actors toeing the over-the-top line fed an unpredictable and fun atmosphere.

Our hike in the Hydro took 37 minutes. Against the $25 general admission, that’s a sizable MPD (minutes of in-attraction entertainment per dollar spent) of 1.48, well over our 1.0 target benchmark. Figuring in the Extreme Pass for a $45 total, it goes down to 0.82. But still good value, considering how much fun we had. We can’t stress enough how fun this place was. We laughed and screamed the entire way through. Seriously, this was the most fun we’ve had at a haunt in a good long while.

The free museum was awesome, the merch room was nicely stocked, and we found props and photo ops in the midway. Two escape rooms, axe throwing, and tarot readings are available for a separate charge.

Special rates are available for groups of 15+, online only and all tickets must be purchased at the same time, please contact the haunt if interested. General admission is $25 in September, the first Friday in October, Sundays in October (open the last two Sundays), and Halloween night. The cost goes up to $30 on the remaining Fridays and Saturdays in October. Add $15 to the base ticket for fast passes and $35 for front of the line passes. The Extreme Pass is another $20.

We recommend the Extreme Pass, if you are up for it. It’s a hell of a good time as long as you don’t mind getting glopped up some. We are sure it added considerably to our time, interactions, and enjoyment.

You also receive a built-in souvenir with the Extreme Pass, a personalized t-shirt featuring an amusing rendition of their fish-man mascot wearing boxing gear and looking like he just went 15 rounds. That’s kind of how we felt too, fish guy. The staff wrote on our shirts, “I got scared and cried” and “I pee easily.” We saw other Extreme guests with shirts that read “I love to smell farts” and “Look down, Code Brown” with an arrow drawn down the back of the shirt. So yeah, something to share with the extended family at Thanksgiving.

Now to address the big question, is The Haunted Hydro still powered up? As you might expect from the preceding review, our answer is an emphatic yes. The new blood more than keeps the freak flag flying. The torch got passed two years ago when Crazy Bob and Co. went out with a bang. We witnessed the best show we’d ever been to at the Hydro in 2022. And now we must say, this year’s edition topped it in several ways.

The power lines are still fully juiced at The Haunted Hydro. Get out there and get amped up for a supercharged show.