Controversy Swirls Around Marlboro Zombie Attraction Featuring Local Mental Hospital

A Marlboro Halloween attraction has caused a major controversy for the real-life premise it’s based on.

In C. Casola Farms' Marlboro Zombie Breakout, participants ride around the farm in the back of military-style vehicles, shooting at zombies who have taken over the farm with paintball guns.

The controversial part? Where the zombies came from.

According to the attraction description, the zombies were once patients living at the real-life Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital. The hospital is known for having patients disappear, never to be found. The event description says, a “disturbed doctor tried to ‘cure’ his patients with injections of odd serums,” which accidentally turned them into zombies.

For Sylvia Axelrod, the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Health New Jersey, the connection to the hospital was disturbing.

“The problem isn’t that they’re doing a zombie attraction, and it’s Halloween and all that, the thing is that the zombies are people with mental illness,” she told Patch.

Axelrod was sensitive to the fact that C. Casola Farms is a family operation but still wanted to see change, saying, “You don’t want to harm them or their bottom line, but it shouldn’t be at the expensive of people who have mental illness.”

A former employee of the Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital, who wished to remain anonymous, echoed this sentiment, saying, “The depiction of Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital in such a negative fashion is also offensive and an insult to the many treatment professionals who had dedicated their lives to caring for and supporting mentally ill patients.”

The Marlboro Zombie Breakout was not intended to be centered on the psychiatric hospital — the hospital was meant to act as a plot device.

“My son just made that up to tell how he created it to explain how the zombies reached our farm,” Danielle Casola, an owner of C. Casola Farms, told Patch.

It was not C. Casola Farms' intention to offend anyone, Casola told Patch. “That felt really bad, to offend people when everyone enjoys it, because everyone knows it’s just for fun, it’s not real!” Casola said with a slight chuckle. Other haunted events at the farms include the more traditional house, hayride and maze.

Although intentions might have been in good fun, Casola said she understood the offense. “We did speak to the offended people, so we did take it and remove the video” teasing the attraction, she said. “But I understand with the mentally ill, and that, [the video] probably offended them so we did remove the video.”

Axelrod said she spoke to Carmine Casola, another owner and namesake of C. Casola Farms, to explain where the offense came from and to ask for a change to the theme. She was disappointed when, a week after speaking with him, the connection to Marlboro Psychiatric Facility remained on the website. (The accompanying video was removed.)

“I was willing to say, ‘You have to educate people, and they didn’t get it, they didn’t mean harm.’ Well, OK, but now you know, and, you know, [Carmine] did say that they were receiving Facebook [messages]” about the attractions, Axelrod told Patch.

Carmine Casola did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Previously, Danielle Casola had only received positive feedback about the attraction, now in its third year, she said. “We’re not trying to hurt anybody’s feelings — we created it that, you know, we’ve had this for three years and I’m just surprised that people are saying stuff now about it,” she told Patch.

Even before C. Casola Farms Marlboro Zombie Breakout, the real Marlboro Psychiatric Facility was drawing horror lovers to its grounds.

Officially, the Department of Environment protection closed the site of the already-shuttered hospital in 2010 for an environment cleanup. During that time, the decaying hospital was a favorite spot among Weird NJ participants, who go to supposedly haunted sites in New Jersey for thrills. Anyone caught on the property, which was gated, was subject to trespassing arrests and fines.

The Marlboro Psychiatric Facility was fully demolished in 2015, 17 years after it stopped treating patients. More than 100 buildings on the 411-acre site were torn down. The C. Casola Farms attraction is not on the site of the now-gone hospital.

For Axelrod, none of that excuses the hospital’s history being used in connection with an attraction where you shoot zombies.

“If this was a hospital that served patients with cancer, would they feel that’s OK? To say people with cancer were given special medication by these doctors and were turned into zombies, and now we’re going to be shooting patients with cancer?” Axelrod asked. “Would you do that with any other illness?”

Image via Patch