Prepare to be Psychologically Unraveled at The Alone Experience

Kaitlin Beauchemin

We are all accustomed to the scary­-spooktaculars that pop up during the month of October. Theme parks and houses are transformed into jovial fright-fests, filled with horror mazes, and 20­-somethings in ghoulish makeup are leaping from the shadows to startle you senseless. This kind of brazen, gleeful terror is par for the course throughout the Halloween season.

For the past two years, however, there has been a new kind of terrifying experience in town. This one is much quieter, and arguably more horrifying than all the others combined; it is The Alone Experience.

Lurking in an undisclosed location in downtown, The Alone Experience is, well, just that. Taking the typical haunted-house theme and turning it on its head for the second year in a row now, participants enter the location one at a time. These brave individuals embark on a 30-minute walkthrough, completely alienated and inconsolably isolated. The website proudly boasts that there aren’t any “blood, guts and psychotic clowns with chainsaws” during the experience; it’s just you and some good old-­fashioned existential terror.

Not wanting to spoil too much of what actually goes on, the website is withholding any uber­-specific information about the experience. It is alluded that participants will be hearing voices throughout, and they are also eerily advised to wear comfortable clothing and shoes because they will need to be able to “run, jump, crawl, climb stairs and get dirty.” Why participants will need to do these things is harrowingly unclear, but certainly attention­-grabbing in its sly ambiguity. Participants will also be made to sign a “Release of Liability” waiver due to the “extreme nature” of the event, a fact that is simultaneously enticing and worrying.

Given all of this information, The Alone Experience appears to be gunning for a truer, more unsettling type of horror; that is the horror that comes with being left alone with your own thoughts and having no one to turn to when those thoughts turn on you. Billed as an “existential haunting,” it seems to be just that. Scary clowns, chainsaws, bogeymen and murderous maniacs don’t really hold a scary candle to the simplest and most basic notions of human loneliness. Because,at the end of the day when darkness starts to creep in, what’s more terrifying than being alone?

The Alone Experience is running Nov. 1. Tickets can be purchased here.