Brighton Asylum: Step Inside The Madness

In Passaic, NJ, there sits a building full of nightmares. Opened in several former industrial warehouses, by the mid 1940’s Brighton Asylum housed some of the most disturbed and dangerous individuals on the East Coast. Due to the almost clandestine external appearance, things went on inside that should never have happened. With almost no oversight, atrocity and horror were the daily routine. Now, decades later, it has reopened for exploration. You can go there tonight, in fact, and find out what you can about the history of the Asylum. A history that might just bleed into the present.

Terrifying the New Jersey area for 13 years, Brighton Asylum is made up of three different haunted attractions and a midway full of games, food, and fright. The award-winning haunts each represent a facet of the Asylum, with different themes all connected to the overall mythos of the attraction.
First, there’s the main attraction: Brighton Asylum. Enter, and you’ll be faced with remnants of the past. The halls run wild with patients and staff, both completely mad, looking for new victims or subjects for experiments. The place is a maze, and you’ll have to use your wits and your feet to find a way out before one of the horrors within takes you and makes you an eternal resident.

You’ll likely find yourself in the tunnels under the Asylum, previously used to transport patients and bodies around the facility away from the prying eyes of the public and authorities. Legend says some patients escaped and made their homes in those tunnels, where they survive today. This attraction is called SubCULTure for a reason, and you’d best be ready to flee at the first sign of life down there. Nothing in those tunnels wants good things for you. Hesitating would be very foolish.

If you make it back to the fresh air of the above-ground, you can enter the former staff quarters. Much more opulent than the Asylum, these rooms were still home to horrific abuse. So much so, the place carried a nickname that has stuck to it through the years: The Bleeding Grounds. It was closed off since 1952, but now it’s open and you can try to find the truth of what happened on this floor. Be careful, though. These former staff members are very invested in keeping their secrets from being revealed, and they still hunger for victims of their perverse desires.

Once you escape the nightmarish traps of the attractions, you can roam the Midway. It’s packed with photo ops, carnival games, a horror museum, horror themed mini escape games and more. If the mini escape rooms whet your appetite for interactive terror, Brighton also offers full-length escape rooms with detailed themes.

If you want fear outside the Halloween season, Brighton Asylum offers specially themed shows for other holidays, such as Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day. The scares don’t end when Fall does!
Go see Brighton Asylum as soon as possible if you like your haunts detailed, terrifying, and high-energy. The whole complex makes for a fantastic night out.

Oh, and tell Frankie we said hi. Just…don’t get too close when you do.