By Griffin Rogers
Midterms and fall break can be a stressful time for students, but for Bellarmine senior Delaney Fuller, the Haunted Pasteur event was the perfect opportunity to let go of pent-up emotions.
“There’s something about getting to scare someone’s pants off that just reinvigorates you,” she said.
Fuller and other like-minded students were actors in the third annual Pasteur Hall haunted house, which took place at Bellarmine’s Fall Fest on Oct. 20.
Assistant Director of the Office of Public Safety Kyle Rieber and Bellarmine student Reagan Hardy work the line outside Haunted Pasteur.
The doors officially opened at 8 p.m., but students were lined up 30 minutes early.
Many came in groups, like Bellarmine junior Caleb Mathis, who brought a few of his friends along to enjoy the frights.
“I actually brought one of my buddies who’s never gone his entire four years, so we managed to bully him into coming here,” Mathis said.
Mathis said he comes to the haunted house every year.
“I’ve been here like the last two times,” Mathis said. “It’s been a cool experience every year. I’ve enjoyed it.”
Other students experienced the event for the first time, such as Bellarmine senior Campbell Oldham.
“I haven’t been to Haunted Pasteur before,” Oldham said. “I don’t think it’s going to be that scary, so I am not really that worried. I think it depends on mindset.”
Oldham said the reason he was going this year was because of his friends.
“I have been peer pressured by my friends to come,” Oldham said. “I don’t really enjoy haunted houses.”
As students waited to get inside, others ran out.
“It was pretty cool,” Bellarmine sophomore Kyle Fuller said. “I liked it, and it was a little scary, too.”
Bellarmine student Sophy Fields poses as Wendy Torrence from the Stanley Kubrick cult classic “The Shining.”
Kyle Fuller said he also enjoyed last year’s haunted house.
“I think this one was a little bit better,” he said. “I am definitely coming again next year.”
Behind the scenes, student volunteers in the haunted house work to ensure the quality of each year’s scares.
“This is my third year doing the haunted house,” Bellarmine senior Caitlyn Franco said. “Reagan Hardy (a fellow Bellarmine student) had introduced me to Katy Goens, who started the haunted house with her family, and I’ve done it ever since.”
Franco said that she enjoys getting to play a scarer.
“Every year, they always do a different theme for it (the room at the end), and I’m usually the finale, so I like chasing people out of the haunted house,” Franco said. “It’s kind of fun.”
Bellarmine student Nicholas Hodges creeps his way toward attendees to give them their first scare of the night.
A lot of the act is improvised, Franco said.
“A lot of it is, like, we come up with ideas as we go about. Like better ways to, I guess, scare people or like better ways to, like, come together and figure it out,” Franco said. “I’ve had lots of fun.”
Franco’s fellow scarer, Delaney Fuller, agreed.
“You definitely don’t get it right the first time,” she said. “It takes like a couple groups to go through before you really figure out what works, so you just can’t get frustrated with that.”
This was Delaney Fuller’s second year participating in Haunted Pasteur.
“Well, I did it last year, and it was a lot of fun and I heard that this year they didn’t have enough people again, so I was like, ‘Well you know, I’ll do it again. It was really fun,’” she said.
Residence Life area coordinator Michael Watts waits behind the doors at the end of the hall to give students one last scare.
Delaney Fuller said that scaring can be fun but doing it for two hours can also be exhausting.
“This year I was in the Pasteur hallway where we had a little graveyard set up with some vampires and zombies,” she said. “It’s so tiring and my feet hurt so badly, but it's so fun that it’s worth it.
More than 200 students attended Haunted Pasteur.
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