This year Alpha Psi Omega (APO), the dramatic honors society on campus, came together a little earlier than usual to put on their annual haunted house. To be inducted into the society students are required to have done a certain amount of work in the theatre and to have a GPA of 3.0. You may have seen last school year’s inductees running around in strange attire during their pledge week in the spring.

On Saturday, October 4, members of APO and some volunteers gathered in the lower level of the Cannon Student Center to decorate the space and their bodies for the “Asylum” themed haunted house. They used items like tarp, black lights, fake body parts, stage makeup, and fake blood to set the scenes. There were multiple group leaders and each had a scene of their own.

The first scene, which took place along the short stretch of hallway after you get off the elevator, was filled with bloody nurses and patients, some yelling at others and at the people who walked past while some were begging for help. Another scene was more focused on torture therapy, and the actors even had short scripts to follow. One group leader who was proud of her scene was Caitlin Billings, a junior. Billings said, “I wanted to be original, yet classic because I was trying to do more than just a jump scare or a gag. I wanted to be creepy. A lot of the asylum stuff—like lobotomy and torture therapy—people saw going through doesn’t really happen in the US anymore, so I thought it was even eerier that in doing cannibalism, I was tackling something that still exists.”

Most of those who went through the haunted house were satisfied with the experience, whether they were actually scared or not. Some people commented that it was hard to be scared when they knew who was trying to jump at them, or it was a girl from their French class who was covered in blood, but they still appreciated what they could tell was a group of people working very hard to put on a good show. If you were not aware of who the APO members and volunteers were, it was much easier to be scared, and some groups were holding onto each other as they went through, flinching at every unnatural sound.