The clubs welcome the haunted house – The Campus

The Allegheny Ghost Club and Gator Activities Programming have collaborated to host a haunted house at Oddfellows Hall on Thursday, October 27 from 9:30-11:30 p.m.
Participants gathered in the lobby of the Oddfellows building and were asked by members of the AGC to form groups, as participants would enter the haunted house in batches of six to twelve.
The designated attendee waiting area offered refreshments, such as fruit punch, to attendees as they waited their turn to experience the haunted house.
“We decided to send people into the haunted house in groups so we wouldn’t suffer from overcrowding,” said AGC president Alex Hopkins, 24. “The group method also made sense since we had a tour guide accompanying the group and telling the story behind our theme.”
The theme for the haunted house was “secret society/cult” and was inspired by the location of the haunted house, according to Hopkins.
“When we decided Oddfellows was the place, we naturally went for a cult theme because of the building’s mystery and history,” Hopkins said.
Participants entered the haunted house with a tour guide to explore and observe the lives of deceased and living members of the secret society who occupied and currently occupy Oddfellows.
“The idea was that each different room the attendees walked into started to feel like something was wrong,” Hopkins said. “Then at the end of the tour there is a finale in which the feeling that something is wrong turns into reality, you realize you have entered a cult and now you are either a member or about to to be sacrificed”
Two tour guides, MCO members Sasha Lu, 25, and Thia Ferderbar, 26, worked in rotation and improvised on the route they would take for their visit.
Before starting their visit, participants were given the opportunity to consent to the actors in the haunted house touching them as part of the act. Participants who consented received a phosphor strip to communicate their consent to the actors.
The tour began with attendees descending the Oddfellow basement which was decorated with cobwebs and fake bloodstains. The lighting was very dim and impromptu noises were made by actors to scare the participants. Hopkins said this part of the tour was about making attendees feel the presence of spirits.
Participants then left the basement through the rear exit and walked through the Oddfellows parking lot.
“The reason the tour included the Oddfellows parking lot garden walk was so that participants could walk the garden which has been fertilized by the remains of members of society who have passed away from this world,” Hopkins said.
The tour then took participants to the first floor hallway of Oddfellows where they were confronted with a room from which loud noises were heard but with no occupants. Participants were encouraged to explore the room and encountered strange objects such as strange photos and wasted pieces of paper.
At the end of the first floor hallway, an injured actor crawled out of a room to ask attendees for help before frantically retreating into the room.

The tour then continued down the stairwell and down the second-floor hallway where an actor came out of hiding to scare attendees. The second-story hallway also contained a room in which a fake corpse of a former Society member was found along with books, candles, and a dagger.
Near the end of the second floor hallway, attendees came across a room in which two actors were in the middle of a sacrificial ceremony. The actor leading the sacrifice was vocal and humorously interacted with the audience saying, “What are you looking at?” and “Get out of my sacrifice room.”
The last room on the tour was a dark room in which all of the cast involved in the tour would gather to “welcome” attendees into worship or “take them to their final resting place”, according to Hopkins.
The tour ended with the guide leading the participants back to Oddfellows Lobby where they were greeted by AGC staff.
The majority of the cast were members of the AGC, but many volunteered through outreach, according to Hopkins.
GAP’s director of marketing and social media, Zula Stenger, 25, said GAP’s main contribution to the event was to provide volunteers and promotion, while all other work was handled by AGC .
“AGC reached out to us earlier in the semester because they wanted to utilize GAP’s extensive social media reach and because we have a lot of members who often volunteer for events,” Stenger said. “GAP were thrilled with the event and the idea and we were more than happy to collaborate.”
Hopkins said AGC began planning for the event a long time ago, with initial discussions taking place during the spring 2022 semester in May. He added that planning for the event continued through the summer and into the start of the fall 2022 semester.
“Our first meeting as a club after returning to campus this year was about the haunted house,” Hopkins said. “The Involvement Fair was when we completely decided we were going to have a haunted house and so about three months of planning went into the event.”
Hopkins thought the event was a success due to the high student turnout. He added that diligent event management is important to AGC given that it is a newer organization on campus.
“We were only officially founded last year and this event was the perfect way for us to announce ourselves on campus,” Hopkins said. “I’m also happy with the timing of the event, we really wanted to give everyone a memorable Halloween experience.”
Stenger, who also attended the event, agreed with Hopkins.
“I hope to see more events like this and hopefully next time AGC will have a bigger budget to make the haunted house even better,” Stenger said.
Hopkins said that while AGC is unlikely to host another event this semester on the same scale as the haunted house, the club will still host smaller, more intimate events in the future.
“Right now we’re going to have a bunch of smaller events like paranormal investigations around campus,” Hopkins said. “We also plan to collaborate with other clubs, if the clubs organize bigger events that they would like us to participate in, we are all in agreement.”