Darlington School brother houses and sister houses joined together to present the annual haunted house last Saturday at the old gym.
“This is our second year doing it in the old gym with Mrs. Picchardo,” Regester dorm leader Grace Armstrong said. “Regester and Moser are going to share two different rooms in the old gym made of old furniture and create a hallway for people to walk through. We’re going to do a toymaker/dollhouse type of thing.”
This activity was student-led, so all the house leaders had to figure out costumes and props by themselves.
“We’re trying to keep the budget down and use our money for things that aren’t costumes,” Armstrong said. “We’re going to use old barbies before dipping into the budget.”
All of the houses had the same theme, but they were all constructed in different ways.
“Our main theme is Barbie,” Neville head day prefect Jack Bell said, “our subtheme is board games and one of those is a lot harder than the other. Barbie is pretty straightforward and simple; we’re going to have a couple of guys dressed up as Barbie with some blood, a ripped dress…Just some overall scary things. And then for board games, we went out to Party City and Spirit Halloween. We got a bunch of the little squares that connect to each other, like puzzle pieces that you would see in a Kindergarten classroom. We’re going to make a little board game out of that.”
The leaders within the houses each got to play a role in the haunted house and scare their classmates.
“I’m going to be a jack-in-the-box,” Bell said. “I’m hopping in a box and it’ll be a good time. It’ll be fun.”
They wore various costumes depending on what role they had.
“I was in the backroom, so I just had an all black outfit with a mask on,” Cooper residential head prefect Phoebe Wilson said. “We had meetings for a couple weeks coming up to the event and then we decided we wanted to do a toy store. We got ideas and used dolls, barbies, board games and then we just got all our resources and discussed what we needed to do.”
Cooper and Summerbell used many resources in the old gym to separate their haunted house from the others.
“We used the soccer academy’s cubbies and the bathroom,” Wilson said. “We made individual rooms for each house. We used tents, cupboards, boards, trash bins, and trash bags.”
Day students and boarding students came to see the final result and to get in the spirit for Halloween.
“I did not expect it to be so good,” sophomore Anna Horlacher said. “It was scarier than I thought it would be.”
House leaders were also responsible for cleaning up the aftermath of the haunted houses.
“The clean-up took maybe an hour,” Wilson said. “We all worked together, so it was done pretty quickly.”