Insomniac Events has been celebrating Halloweekend with its Escape series since 2011, and this year was no different. This year’s Escape: Psycho Circus played home to plenty of haunts and horrors, ghosts and goblins for the more than 50,000 attendees that flooded the NOS Event Center. But many of those guests, unfortunately, were turned away.
The key phrase to recognize here is “more than 50,000 attendees”, because only 50,000 tickets were sold. Many of the headliners, as Insomniac calls them, who showed up to the festival either tried to literally crash the gate or had fake tickets.
In response to these major issues, Insomniac founder and all-around master of raves Pasquale Rotella hopped on social media to share his views.
Rotella began his Facebook post by thanking everyone for an event filled with great times and good vibes, but recognized that issues were indeed present, and needed to be resolved.
He then addressed the long wait times to enter the event, first clarifying the event was not oversold. The wait times were caused by having to deny entry to those with counterfeit tickets, he said.
“Despite our warnings to not purchase from unknown sources, we did have THOUSANDS of people show up with fake tickets,” Rotella wrote. “Turning away so many disappointed people wasn’t easy, and it created delays at the entrances and box office.”
Rotella also said the issue of gate crashers and wait times to get to specific stages – in this case, to get inside the BassRush tent, the “Chopping Block” – were in the midst of being resolved. Every event is a learning experience, he said, and every event will therefore be better than the last.
“We’ve already begun discussing new strategies to outsmart the scalpers and the gate crashers because it’s frustrating to have the night start off on a sour note after working so hard to prepare a great show. I hope that when you did get inside you enjoyed everything we had in store for you and felt the love we put into the event.”
