All Saints Lunatic Asylum in Apple Valley is a spooky place to visit in High Desert

It is that time of year to get your scare on!

Yep, October is the month for spooks and goblins to wander the streets in hopes of administering a lot of fear in us mere humans.

Well, for those who believe.

According to a United States government survey conducted in 2021, 41% of Americans believe in ghosts. The other 59% are too afraid to say either way.

“What if I’m wrong and Casper shows up in my bedroom floating around angrily?” one participant may have asked.

So, with October here, I thought I’d check in with my buddy, Cody Dare, of The New Reality, to learn what haunts I needed to check out.

“Dude, you gotta go to the All Saints Lunatic Asylum in Apple Valley,” Cody said. “There’s a lot of paranormal action going on there.”

It has also been a professional Haunted House in the High Desert for the past eight years. Of course, it is haunted - it is supposed to be.

It can’t be a lunatic asylum if all the patients are sitting around in Lazy-boys watching sit-coms and telling each other they are fine.

Nope, a lunatic asylum has to be a place of horror, torture, grief, terror, and all the other things that make people afraid to enter. No one is afraid to enter a lunatic asylum resembling Friends.

“Oh, Rachel,” Monica may say. “You look just horrible with that leather mask strapped to your face while bound to a shopping cart.”

Rachel will only snarl and drool, but we all know it will work out for the best by the end of the episode.

I drove to Apple Valley to check out this lunatic asylum, making sure I took my get-out-of-asylum-free card with me - just in case.

Christy and Richard Cerreto, the owners of the All Saints Lunatic Asylum, met me at the double glass doors of their haunting business.

They were normal-looking people. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but a couple who enjoy scaring the bejesus out of people may have looked like they had just exited a wild rage of Alice Cooper enthusiasts.

Nope, and to boot, they are college professors. Perhaps the place is haunted - making demons appear like well-educated humans.

How dastardly!

The couple were a lovely duo who liked being surrounded by ghoulish and bloody exhibits.

“It started at our home,” Christy explained. “We love Halloween and would sit on our front porch handing out candy and scaring the trick-or-treaters.”

“Then it branched out to a maze of fear in our backyard for the neighbor children,” Richard said.

I wondered if this was my cue that it was time to leave. I’ve seen too many films where this could go wrong - I was hoping there wasn’t a shed I’d hide in and learn it was full of chainsaws.

“We don’t use chainsaws here,” Christy reassured me.

Huh? I thought I had just said that quietly inside my head.

Before my tour of the fear factory, I contacted Cody Dare and Shawn Warren from The New Reality - the paranormal investigative group.

“All Saints Lunatic Asylum has always given me an uneasiness, a feeling of darkness, and never feeling alone,” Cody shared. Shawn is pretty excellent about the paranormal stuff - him being a psychic medium and all - not sure what that means, but he is good at it.

He continued. “You can feel the oppression as soon as you walk into the door, always disorienting me.”

Richard, Christy, and I were in the lobby, where visitors to their macabre realm checked in, and I did not feel any of the things Cody or Shawn had shared with me.

Then again, when someone insults me, I generally say, “You hurt my feelings.” Perhaps I left that feeling by the glass entry doors.

“The New Reality has been here,” Christy commented. “It was awesome to see how professional they are.”

Richard nodded. “They always try to find a logical reason for any strange occurrences, then they can rule them out.”

And that is the case for legitimate paranormal investigators. At least 95% of weird stuff can be put down as wind, clouds, imagination, or other issues that may be nothing. The remaining 5% that cannot be explained intrigues these investigators of the unknown.

It is much like when my beautiful wife, Laureen, shops and tells me she is saving money by buying a lot of stuff we don’t need because it is on sale.

Cody takes more of an intuitive empath approach - again, I have no idea what that means.

“The place is off the charts with paranormal activity. There is something very dark in the chapel room.”

The asylum is broken up into many rooms. There is the administrative room, the morgue, the children's room, the hospital room, the dentist's office, the chapel, the Sasquatch cage, and so much more to entertain and delight.

“When the crew was here,” Christy started, “They were conducting an EVP, and clearly, a doll was directing one of the female members to choose a certain doll in the room. When she chose the wrong doll, the voice told her ‘no’ and directed her to the correct one.”

An EVP is about an electronic voice phenomenon for the neophytes, which are sounds found on electronic recordings interpreted as spirit voices.

Though I have been on an investigation with Cody and Shawn, I still have no idea what that means, except in layperson's terms, it may be when Betelgeuse insults us, and we can hear him.

“Sorry, Betelgeuse, but I left my feeling at the door,” I may return.

I asked Richard and Christy if the building in which the asylum is located in Apple Valley was built on some sacred Native American land. Perhaps an old Western cemetery? Maybe a devil-worshiping pond?

“Nope,” Richard replied. “A strip mall built in the 1970s. I think there was a butcher shop here, a church, and who knows.”

A butcher shop. Hmm.

“Cody got struck by a screw right into his chest,” Christy told me.

“I’ve stepped on nails right through my foot when picking up dog poop in the backyard,” I replied.

She stared at me. “No, when they were filming by the casket, Cody was conducting a sensory deprivation when suddenly a screw flew at him from the casket, right into his chest.”

I nodded as if I understood.

“They caught it on tape,” Richard shared.

At that point, the tour through all the rooms was conducted by my guests, and it was enlightening, thrilling, and terrifying. But, I am not going into detail since I would not want to ruin the surprise for any potential visitors.

Besides, I had my eyes closed most of the time. When I saw Granny rocking in her wheelchair with a face that would terrify Jeffrey Dahmer, I knew this place was real.

As I learned during the tour, pretty much everything within the asylum walls is antiques acquired from places where folks may not have been treated as well as they should have been while alive or even after death.

Could it be that it is not the actual building where the asylum is located that is haunted but the artifacts contained there? Does the very existence of these items conjure up dark energy that then releases itself on unsuspecting humans? Does the culmination of all these objects together in one place open the portal to the underworld? Is this where the beginning meets the end?

I don’t know - but it is very cool.

Just before I left, Richard pointed out a slew or a slaying of awards earned by his and Christy’s haunted enterprise. It was pretty impressive: the best live theater, innovative business, the best place to work, the best place to have a birthday party, and my favorite - the best place to wet your pants in public.

Did I feel any paranormal activities while at the asylum?

Nope, but that does not mean there isn’t. I know this, though, wandering those dark halls and viewing actual pieces obtained from real asylums, mortuaries, hospitals, morgues, and who knows where else, there could be very well stuff happening there no one can explain.

Perhaps there is some energy present at this asylum. Perhaps there is not - but the only way to find out personally is to visit.

And no, I am not a paid spokesperson for the All Saints Lunatic Asylum. Richard and Christy asked me to come back when it was open for guests for free. I turned them down.

I like my pants dry.

For more information: http://www.allsaintsasylum.com/

Catch Cody and Shawn on their YouTube channel - The New Reality Paranormal

John can be contacted at beyersbyways@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Visalia Times-Delta: All Saints Lunatic Asylum in Apple Valley is a spooky place