Screams echoed throughout Wyckoff Hall the night of Oct. 25, as students braved the terrors of the Bradley Hall Council’s haunted house.
These Braves formed a long line outside the hall. While only a few wore costumes, each was prepared to see how iconic horror movie villains could be brought to life.
Some haunted houses start slow, with an underwhelming scare at the beginning that makes everything after even more jarring. This one took a different approach.
A guide accompanied groups of six, encouraging them to rush up the dimly lit stairs. The groups noted feeling adrenaline as if they were running away from something.
“When we were rushed through and … scurried along, that was good,” Rowan Bucholtz, a sophomore biochemistry major, said. “It wasn’t scary, but like [an] adrenaline rush.”
Before they could catch their breath, a loud metal banging greeted the visitors in the graveyard-decorated dorm.
The first of many gimmicks, some remember this moment most vividly.
“[The] cemetery thing [where] someone was banging on the walls. Yeah, that was scary, I’m not gonna lie,” Adia McGee, a senior creative writing major, said.
Another essential element of a haunted house is anticipation, which the Hall Council accounted for by assigning “hallway actors” to keep the Braves on their toes, never knowing what would come next.
“The scariest part is when I was walking down the hallway, and they’re hiding behind something and they jump out at you,” Isabella Turner, a junior art major, said.
After three floors of haunted dorms with thrills ranging from clowns playing a “press the button and see what happens” game with visitors, where nothing happens, to guests helping an actor exorcise a screaming counterpart, the final challenge was to stick the landing.
As guests reached the end of their haunted route, an actor dressed as a little girl asked them if they were her babysitters before inviting them to see if there was a monster under her bed. As they prepared to see something under the blankets, another actor jumped from the closet behind them with loud bangs, yelling at them to leave.
Aaron McWhorter, a freshman psychology major, noted how past haunted house experiences added to this one.
“There was one … [where] we went into a room and a monkey had cymbals and he started banging [them] really loud, saying ‘Get out! Get out!’ There were a few ‘get-outs’ here too, so I got deja vu,” McWhorter said.
After the haunted house came to an end, more excitement awaited. Visitors could make their way to a rest area where candy and apple juice were displayed on the tables, with the option to take photos on the other side of the room.
Set a week before Halloween, the Hall Council’s haunted house gave students a safe space to be scared and get into the spooky spirit of the holiday.
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