Unwilling test subjects and mad scientists will roam the halls of Epworth Dormitory this Halloween from 6 to 9 p.m. when students convert the East Campus dorm into a research center gone wrong for its annual haunted house.
“It’s going to be pretty sick,” said freshman Simone Serat, Devils After Dark representative and house council member for Epworth. “There will be disfigurements, lots of cutting people up and maybe a couple of people will even go missing.”
Residents of Epworth and Aycock will don disguises to transform the dorm, as students have done in previous years.
“It was fun because we got to see our friends trying to be creepy,” said sophomore Julianna Martinez, who attended the haunted house last year. “They decorate pretty well, and the students are scary.”
Rumors featuring ghosts in Epworth have been spreading recently, Serat said.
“We’re trying to play up the haunted reputation [of the dorm] before the event,” she said. “I actually had someone from another dorm warn me Epworth was haunted.”
Epworth’s reputation as eerie, precedes the haunted house event. A ghost named Old Jeffrey reputedly plagued the dorm’s namesake, a parish in England, in the eighteenth century. In Mary Beth Crain's book Haunted Christmas: Yuletide Ghosts and Other Spooky Holiday Happenings, she described the ghost as “rattling and thundering in every room” of the rectory.
Locally, Epworth residents hope to maintain the dorm's spooky reputation.
“I’m looking forward to just seeing how the whole thing turns out,” Serat said. “I hope we can scare the pants off East Campus.”
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