Haunted Mansion of Long Branch: Emails (2012)

NAME/DATE	CONTENT
10/19/12 Jim	Thanks for keeping the history alive. This was a place I used to visit often until the fire. The actors were great, the mansion itself was done well. Wish one day someone decides to build something like it.
8/25/12 Steven	Greetings! I just happened upon your fantastic homage web page and it filled me with so many complex emotions and nearly oppressive nostalgia! ....haha.... Your site is phenomenal and beautiful. Unfortunately, I never made it down to CASTLE DRACULA or BRIGANTINE, only to Long Branch, though I did visit the HAUNTED MANSION several times, as a child and again at age seventeen (at which time I was so obnoxious I started following 20/30 something couples around myself scaring them. I wish there were even more pics available for you to post of the interior of the mansion, it was truly remarkable the imagination and morbid detailed ingenuity the mansion embodied. There were so many indelibly impressive wax sculptures.....One that really stands out in memory was a very large and elaborate torture chamber scenario replete with a pendulum swinging viewed from atop it as one would ascend the ramps leading into the more claustrophobic, less spacious portions.....so much detail and so much gory goings on in that torture chamber! Another I recollect was behind glass and depicted a huge, fanged abominable snowman type beast covered in blood and surrounded by snow and, if I recall, a partially eaten human body beside it? These were exquisite works of art that were meant to be gazed upon just like museum dioramas! The menacing looped orchestral music piece playing outside of and, if I recall properly, within the main open area within, the mansion also made an impression. No modern haunted house or Disney type animatronic and holographic technical display can ever capture this very specific atmosphere that the mansion embodied. There is a pathological morbidity here that seemed culturally unique to the time period (1970's) and the equivalent done since then is just not the same at all, also seems much more overdone and far more 'forced', though it's purely my subjectivity. Anyway, hope you are able to excavate more pics and memorabilia relative to these extinct wonders! Keep up the great work and love!