Haunted MU to host Halloween-themed activities

A skeleton on a Memorial Union balcony, photographed on October 30, 2016. The Memorial Union will be hosting several Halloween events in upcoming days.

With this year’s Halloween slowly creeping to an end, it’s still not too late to enjoy some haunted Halloween treats.

For the first time ever, the Memorial Union is hosting a Haunted House, from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. tonight and tomorrow. Students who attend will be able to enjoy two separate mazes, one in the ballroom and the other upstairs.

The upstairs maze consists of six separate rooms: the Witches, Graveyard Zombie and Ghost room as well as the Infestation, Operations and Mad Scientist room. Downstairs in the Ballroom is the seventh and final room:  the Strange Things Maze.

Other activities include playing hide and seek, watching “spooktacular” movies and meeting the many “s-characters” that will be present at this event. To top it all off, Monday night will provide Hogwarts-themed games and fall treats.

With the help of student employees, volunteers and faculty, the MU committee really pulled through and are excited to show off this Haunted House dream that came to life, according to Deb Mott, MU assistant director.

“The work that this group has been doing hasn’t been done to this level before here at the MU and in their planning and passion they’ve outdone themselves,” Mott said.   

The Haunted House idea was first brought up by Heather Rapp, event coordinator for the MU, at the beginning of this summer. Student employees, including Philip Harman, Jared Henningsen and Nate Cattle, were instructed to create the Haunted MU event at the beginning of the term.

The students worked tirelessly to create the Haunted MU that it is today, said Heather Rapp, MU event coordinator.

“I kind of had a vision that these guys have taken to a new level,” Rapp said. “I would say, ‘what if we had skeletons scaling the building?’ and then to see what they’re actually able to do is phenomenal.”

One of the biggest challenges faced with putting this event together was time—the planning and preparation didn’t begin until fall term, 2016. It was the students’ jobs to take charge in this project. Heather said that after this Halloween, they will begin planning in January for next year’s event.  

With budget and time constraints, the students had to be very creative with the tools they had and received from various sources, including four fog machines provided by the Athletic Department, chemistry supplies from surplus and a Pepsi grant for the cream soda that will be served.

“The collaboration has been really fun… branching out and sort of feeding off of each other’s energy when we say “look what I made it’s so cool!” and trying to creep out our coworkers to see if we can get that buzz in our guest as well,” Harman said.

Over 200 people are expected to show up to the Haunted MU, according to Rapp. The event is free and open to both the OSU students and the Corvallis community. This event is not suitable for children.

 

Was this article helpful?
YesNo