![]() With music, dialogue, and sound effects, the eight-minute show is essentially a ghost story written on the face of the Winchester Mystery House. It’s a site-specific piece of digital mapping, which brings the facade of the mansion to life, telling the story of an unfortunate tour guest who suffers through an unnerving overnight stay after being accidentally left behind. The other Halloween highlight is the Unhinged Light Show, which is much more than just spooky lights dancing in the night. Unhinged Review: Light Show A digital light show is mapped onto the facade of Winchester Mystery House. Nevertheless, this is a mammoth experience that exploits its location to fullest effect. Partly that is because the experience involves some level of interaction within each room, so guests are stopping to see what’s happening, not walking through continuously. Midway through, you overhear a radio report about the Winchester Mystery House tour being shut down by police because thirteen guests are missing since their guide took them off the approved route in other words, you have gone missing, just like the faces on the posters outside, just like the little girl whose father told you of her disappearance. We won’t say much more than that, except that the thread is tied up at the end with a sort of afterlife reconciliation that invites visitors to remain…forever.Īt sixty-five minutes in length, Unhinged offers much more than other Halloween haunted houses – even more than the redoubtable Reign of Terror Haunted House in Thousand Oaks. The premise is that your guide, frustrated by the slow pace of the preceding tour, has taken a detour off the usual route, taking you into the basement, where bad things soon happen. There is a narrative thread that ties the scenes together by following through on the setup seen outside. Look more closely, and you will see the corpse’s eyes open and make contact – even though she is beneath the surface of the water! Look closely, and you will see the body is her own. We don’t want to reveal a major spoiler, but one example of this is so subtle it is easy to overlook: one young woman weeps mournfully over a body drowned in a bathtub. One clever recurring theme is seeing a character and a body and realizing they are one and the same. Most rooms offer an encounter, some longer than others, often revealing details of past tragedies. What these apparitions don’t do – with one or two exceptions – is deliver jump-scares. The hour-long journey takes guests through a series of vignettes, where the ghosts of the past manifest to haunt the living in a variety of ways: some reenact their death, oblivious of observers others take note of their guests, lavishing them with unwanted attention. In fact, Unhinged is a full-blown haunted house, loaded with live actors, special effects, spectral lighting, and eerie audio. ![]() ![]() Unhinged is somewhat misleadingly billed as an “immersive Halloween experience,” which suggests something much milder than delivered – maybe a ghost hunt or a seance, with a few shadows and some rapping in the walls. There’s really not an environment among Los Angeles haunts that can compare except for the Queen Mary Dark Harbor. Unhinged, however, transforms the location into the haunted house of our collective nightmares, casting a funereal pall with its sinister lighting and taking guests into dark, decrepit rooms not seen on regular tours. Even during the night-time flashlight tour we took in 2012, it did not seem particularly intimidating (dozens of people with flashlights can illuminate the rooms fairly brightly). For those who have never been, the Winchester Mystery House is not particularly mysterious at least by daylight, it seems more eccentric than esoteric, with its odd architecture, doors that open on nothing, and stairs that lead nowhere. The star attraction of Unhinged is a guided night-time tour of the mansion’s interior. Unhinged Review: Tour One of the Unhinged denizens of Winchester Mystery House
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