Chasing Fear at ‘Krusebel Extreme Haunt: St. Jeffrey’s Asylum’ (Review)
Eight hours in Utah’s only underground extreme haunt
Originally published on 10/27/2021
Finding Krusebel was an accident. What first caught my eye was an Instagram post about a remote alternate reality game (ARG) called Advance Treatment. Players who signed up were asked if they wanted to complete a mysterious treatment online or in person. I chose in-person and spent the next several weeks solving puzzles, texting with characters, and exploring phobias in remote “group therapy” sessions. Not all Advance Treatment players chose to attend St. Jeffrey’s Asylum. But I wanted to know what Krusebel might do with a detailed list of my most personal fears, so I grabbed tickets to both.
(Spoilers follow.)
Krusebel is an eight-hour immersive horror experience that puts attendees through the mostly-proverbial-but-sometimes-literal wringer. It’s attached to Castle of Chaos, Utah’s “only underground haunted house,” but differs from the regular haunt in length, intensity, and level of personalization.
This isn’t some 30-minute corn maze. It’s an endurance test that starts at 10 pm and lasts through sunrise. Five out of fourteen “patients” made it through my stay at the asylum. Most tapped out somewhere between 40 minutes and six hours into the experience, citing pride, discomfort, and fear as motivators. Those of us who stayed through 6 am were more than a little surprised that we’d made it that long. It’s impossible to know how much time has passed when you’re trapped in a windowless basement.
Your basic stat at the asylum includes “restraints, dramatic temperature changes, clothing destruction or removal, and light striking,” but not electroshock — that starts when you opt-in at level eight. Level 10 guests sign a waiver that covers, among other things, “head-shaving” and “forced ingestion.” I’d already buzzed my hair a few weeks back and I wasn’t keen on eating god-knows-what, so I took a gamble and went in at level nine.
This was my first extreme haunt. I love horror and hate jump scares, which means most haunted houses are on my do-not-fly list. Krusebel, however, seemed like a unique opportunity to play with fear minus the kind of non-stop adrenaline rush that shorter seasonal haunts rely on.
It started as a joke. “What kind of idiots go on vacation to get tortured?” Answer: the kind of idiots I met and bonded with over the pandemic. Most of us connected during an emotionally taxing remote alternate reality game (ARG) in late 2020. Immersive has a way of short-circuiting standard relationship-building scripts, and the story we’d told together had been deeply personal — I knew everyones’ darkest secrets before I’d learned their names. It’s hard not to trust people who invest authentically in a shared experience like that. So by January 2021, we had moved from joking about recreating the intensity of our first ARG IRL to booking rooms in LA. Our plan was to road trip from there to Las Vegas and then to Midvale, UT, as soon as it was safe to travel. We’d stop at immersive hotspots along our route, and Krusebel would be our glorious finale.
The road trip was great. We hit up Madcap Motel, the SAW Escape Room, and Meow Wolf Las Vegas’ Omega Mart. We wandered through Evermore… and talked about what we might have gotten ourselves into with Krusebel. None of us had been to anything like it before, so the possibilities felt endless. Looking back now at a mental snapshot of myself and my friends (wet and shivering in a small cell, staring at a handful of Latter-day Saints teenagers) is both absurd and, somehow, annoyingly specific. Before Krusebel, my mind was filled with ill-defined terrors; broken light bulbs and disembodied footsteps around corners. I obsessed over having told the game-runners of Advance Treatment that my biggest fear was sticking my hand into a dark hole. Would that play into my treatment at Krusebel? What if I couldn’t do it? Would I be kicked out or would I have to do something worse? What could possibly be worse than sticking my hand into a dark hole?!
The thought was awful and exhilarating. It was fear, and I wanted more.
What actually happened at Krusebel was cathartic and engaging — but unrelated to any of the fears I’d shared in Advance Treatment. I later learned that Advance Treatment had been created by a Krusebel fan before getting integrated into the experience as an add-on. The creator was physically present and in character at Krusebel, but the relationship he and I had built during Advance Treatment never came into play. Any personalization I experienced at Krusebel had more to do with the experience’s excellent actor-to-participant ratio and a survey I had filled out months earlier.
Krusebel participants get lots of personal attention. My group started out crammed into a dirty little room. Doctors, nurses, and a few deranged orderlies regularly stormed in to pluck off individuals for specialized sessions. We never knew when they were coming or who they were coming for, and we couldn’t choose where they might take us, but I’m sure I got sent to my least favorite room twice for a reason. Beyond personal attention, uncertainty was Krusebel’s most effective driver of fear. Patients were constantly moved from room to room, making it impossible to tell how many of us were left at any given moment. In-universe rules were strict but vague, and nobody was to be trusted. A few hours in, my ARG bestie confessed that he had opted out of a particularly rough treatment by telling an orderly that I would take his place. I was shocked, not that it mattered. Seconds later a hood was thrown over my head and I was whisked away for a treatment of my own. Those are the kinds of head games that make Krusebel special. It’s an experience that shines when everyone’s a little off-balance and nobody is allowed to see the big picture.
I think that’s why the scariest part of my Krusebel experience was not knowing what was going to happen until we showed up. Before the event, anything was possible. Two hours in, the doctors’ snatch-and-grab routine had started to seem… normal. I got a feeling for the kind of pain I was likely to encounter — everything from electrical to impact, but nothing that crossed into “this might leave permanent marks” territory — and decided I could deal with it. My habit of laughing when things get weird (Drill Sergeants loved me in Basic Training) plus a strategically-worn gold cross might have unsettled some actors just enough for them to take it easier on me than the others, but still. The longer I stayed at St. Jeffrey’s, the less afraid I felt. Krusebel, it turns out, was more of a themed endurance test than a deep dive into fear. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t a unique and worthwhile experience — it is, and I’m glad I went. But I was let down on the fear front.
Extreme haunts are divisive as hell. I’d wanted my time at Krusebel to be psychologically terrifying. But I’m differently pleased that it was dark and physically challenging. One of my saner friends recently marveled (that’s putting it politely, but he’s a polite guy) at my attraction to physically and emotionally uncomfortable scenarios. What it comes down to, for me, is an appreciation of discomfort as a signpost. I like experiencing discomfort in immersive+ environments because stakes are lower there than they are in the wild. Every time my discomfort teaches me to recognize an outer limit in a haunt or a show, I move a little closer to being able to recognize and practice things like boundary-setting in real life.
In any case, my Krusebel experience was my own. I felt good about the event’s safety mechanisms: showrunners communicated clearly with me in advance, the waiver was comprehensive, and I knew how to opt-out if things got too intense. I trusted myself to know my body and my boundaries. But I also didn’t need to request any special medical or physical adjustments to my Krusebel experience.
That’s not true for all attendees. Two friends from my run chose to leave the experience early after allowances management had agreed to in advance weren’t honored in person. Another friend left when their experience shifted towards degradation, and one attendee needed post-event medical attention after a fumbled slap. I realize balancing intensity and safety can get complicated, and I believe that an informed, risk-aware audience should be allowed to choose whether or not they participate in a dangerous experience. Not every show needs to have its rough edges sanded down for safety’s sake. But that only works if showrunners know how to respond when something doesn’t go according to plan. In this case, I wasn’t impressed with Krusebel’s lack of response to players who reported feeling “emotionally and psychologically overwhelmed for all of the wrong reasons.”
The attendees I spoke with after the show felt like miscommunication had played a role in their botched experiences. It’s likely that management had genuinely intended to honor their requests, but hadn’t communicated any changes to the whole cast. The in-show confusion this created was understandable but not excusable. To be clear, nobody at Krusebel is going to hold your hand when it comes to advocating for your own personal safety. If you need something that was agreed upon in advance, you’ll need to be able to stand up and yell about it during the in-person “pre-show” — even though all staff interactions from the minute you pull into the parking lot are in character. An easy fix would be the addition of five out-of-character minutes to the waiver-signing process. Actors could maintain an intimidating aura in public areas while pulling individuals aside for one last human-to-human check-in before things got real. Until something like that happens, caveat emptor.
I do appreciate that Krusebel is a singular experience. There aren’t tons of producers out there combining horror with full immersion, physicality, the exploration of boundaries, and a certain type of puzzle-solving the way Krusebel does. It’s absolutely not perfect and it needs to be more accessible. Extreme fear shouldn’t need to rely on treating everyone the same regardless of physical, medical, or psychological needs. This goes double for an event that does limited runs for small audiences. Every Krusebel attendee fills out a detailed survey well before their event. I’d love to see Krusebel lean into these personalization opportunities instead of treating special requests like roadblocks. Not only would this make the experience more accessible, it would make the whole thing scarier and less cookie-cutter.
The million-dollar question for any haunt is “would I go back and do it again?” The answer, for me, is a tentative yes. I’m privileged enough to feel good about my experience, so I’d be interested in trying it again next year. I’m not entirely sure why — maybe I want to retest my limits and check out some of the rooms I missed. Maybe I want to find out if anticipatory fear is different when you know exactly what’s waiting for you. Or maybe I want to see if the only person from my group who went in at a level 10 (one of the Latter-day Saints teens who was already on her second stay at the asylum, if you’re curious) comes back for round three.
What I do know is that stumbling, disheveled and dehydrated, out of Krusebel at 6 am was a borderline transcendent experience. A handful of us had made it through our treatments. The streets were deserted; early morning sun rose over a used car dealership. Plastic skeletons, zip-tied to a chain link fence, swayed harmlessly in the breeze. Those of us who weren’t quite ready to leave stuck around to compare notes — I can’t believe you said that to an orderly! They left you in that room for how long? And huh, yeah. I don’t know why, but I’m thinking about doing it again, too.
I wonder if level 10 is as bad as everyone says…
Krusebel Extreme Haunt: St. Jeffrey’s Asylum is in Salt Lake City, Utah. They are not currently booking new guests.
