By Anda Totoreanu & Ev Lederman
Photos Courtesy of Dave Wenger
The Thursday of Halloween weekend, two of Lafayette’s Greek organizations, Phi Kappa Psi and Delta Gamma, teamed up to change a fraternity house into a haunted house for fellow students and their Easton neighbors. The haunting tale of an unnamed visitor and her experience is told below.
It was the perfect autumn evening: pitch black, raining, and stone silent. The only thing you could hear as you walked through campus were the screams of those unfortunate enough to be trapped inside the “hospital” on March Field.
The “hospital” was none other than the second annual Phi Psi and Delta Gamma Haunted House held last Thursday evening which proved to be a blood-curdling, hair-rising journey. Greeted on the front steps by Evan Gooberman ‘13, whose ashen face streaked with “blood” served to warn you of what was to come, you are welcome to bob for apples, do a beanbag toss, get your face painted, or buy a snack at the bake sale while you wait anxiously to enter the ominous hospital.
When you are finally ushered out of the cold and into the foyer, things seem relatively normal—at first. After watching a clip projected onto the back wall about the hospital’s need for donations, a frightening, blood-drenched character comes to greet you—your tour guide.
The guide leads you up cobwebbed stairs into a pitch-black hallway where all you can see are the pale-faces of the wide-eyed nurses holding clipboards. They walk past you slowly and creepily as you follow your guide into the surgical ward. White plastic tablecloths loom terrifyingly on the walls, covered with smears of red sometimes shaped like handprints. While you watch a patient die during a surgical operation and then get carried off into the next room by a hospital worker, a man lying on the floor pulsating blood makes a grab for you before the doctor drags him back onto the operating table already covered in gushing red.
Ushered back into the hallway, patients hiding in the shadows or sprawled on the floor reach out in the darkness, grabbing onto your ankles.
The burned victims ward is next. A being dressed as a doctor comesdonations of skin—your skin.
On to the infectious diseases ward. You are cautioned not to touch your contaminated surroundings, which look suspiciously like black lights and glow-in-the-dark spray paint. A doctor figure declares the bones of his patient (just a guy, Mason Carter ’11, who doesn’t look too much older than you) brittle, and whips out his reflex-testing hammer. With just a light knee-tap of the hammer, half of the patient’s leg falls off completely. Your tourguide leaves to go wash his hands.
Bloody handprints cover the mirrors and walls of the bathroom next door. A bloody patient screams at you to “GET OUT!”
You run into the psych ward. Crazy patients call out to you while a demon-possessed patient strangled a priest.
The guide hurries you out, leading you down a creaky stairwell. A man in a plaid shirt and jeans runs up the steps; the next thing you know, the window next to you is filled with a hanging body dressed in plaid and jeans. Looking a little lumpier in death?
The door shuts behind you as you enter the basement, lit only by strobe lights, and patients snatch at you. You see the owner of the hospital on a couch tied up screaming, “Don’t trust HIM!” Your tour guide has been an escaped patient all along.
Doctors in white lab coats take hold of your guide and usher you out of the building, hands shooting out of the darkness still seizing onto your clothes.
Surrounded by the familiar back of the Phi Psi house, you breath a sigh of relief, but a man carrying a chainsaw chases you until you’re safely close to the busy center of good old March Field.
