With scares and screams, the Aledo Players hosted a haunted house Saturday, Oct. 26, transforming the campus art hall into a labyrinth of eerie, elaborate rooms for the Halloween season.
Working to bring it to life, freshman Marion Robbins played the role of a zombie.
“We spent almost four hours the night before working on it,” Robbins said. “Everything was very stressful for me.”
The effort paid off as the event lasted several hours into the night, and senior Will Beyer said “all the lights surprisingly didn’t overheat and burn down the school—that’s a plus.”
This is the first year students have put on the event since the pandemic, and senior Mason Steele said he is excited about the return of this tradition and the whole process was “a blast for everyone involved.”
The haunted house included several themed rooms, each presenting a unique horror setting. Freshman Sabrina Dansie, one of the actors in the zombie room, said she found the set design particularly impressive.
“My favorite was probably the insane asylum because that was just so fun to do, and I thought the lighting was really good in there,” Dansie said. “It’s way more high quality, and way more fun to do.”
To accommodate different age groups, the event featured both a kids and adult version. Dansie said the was fun because “I actually scared people, meanwhile in the adult one, people just stared at us like we were weirdos.”
The adult version allowed actors to perform scarier stunts, but some students found joy in interacting with the variety of guests.
“I was a guide; I took people around, like groups of about six,” junior Curt Vermillion said. “I could be more interactive; I could tell more jokes. It was more fun. It wasn’t as serious.”
The event was a hit not only with guests but also among the students bringing it to life. Senior Maura Jaros, who worked in the zombie room, said she enjoyed the energy shared with fellow classmates.
“I got all the sound effects with another friend, Macy Washburn, and we had all the actors in specific rooms play it whenever people walked in,” Jaros said. “The first sounds were Minecraft zombie noises meant for the kids, and the adult version had The Last of Us clicker noise.”
Despite initial concerns, the haunted house exceeded expectations. As groups ran out the exit doors screaming, students knew their hard work had paid off.
“I genuinely had such an amazing time working with everybody, as much as the room I was working in wasn’t my favorite personally, but I still loved working on it,” Jaros said. “I was screaming, laughing. It wasn’t like you’re absolutely scared, but it’s like a one-kind-of-scare.”
