Langdell Hosts Asylum of Terror

Langdell’s Asylum of Terror perfectly encapsulated the spirit of Halloween. Between hanging spiders dangling from cobwebs on the walls to ghouls that followed you through the maze of doorways, the asylum left any student brave enough to enter with a feeling of fright. 

Located in the basement of Phillips Hall on Friday night, the dark, close-quarters space served as the perfect path for the asylum. The hallway transformed into a corridor of horror, with eerie decorations strewn across the floor and masked performers hiding around each corner, shouting at students who dared to enter and discover each room’s surprise.

Just outside of the building, students waited anxiously as they listened to the piercing screams, unaware of the impending journey they were about to embark on. Lower Avery Giles said, “Every time the door opened to let more people inside, all I could hear were screams coming from the basement. At these sounds, the people in line shuddered with anxiety and tried to get a peek of what was happening.”

Before the event started, everyone in Langdell who prepared for the event was just as anxious as the people waiting in line. Everyone involved with the creation of the asylum was focused on providing the best experience for all of its attendees. There were many teams of workers all concentrated on different aspects of the final event. The event itself needed decorations, costumes and crowd-control to be in place before the start of the asylum. Besides the concrete details that went into preparing the event, there was a massive amount of advertising effort by the girls of Langdell.

Lower Jo de La Bruyere said, “Everyone was just concentrated on making this haunted house as interesting, frightening and random as possible. The team that helped create the event wanted to make the asylum scarier than last year’s by using better, scarier decorations and making a better path for the victims of the asylum.”

There were many changes to the event this year, and many students found the new venue of the basement of Phillips Hall to be much better suited for a asylum setting, compared to last year’s, which was located in Grainger auditorium. Many of the students who visited the asylum found the event to live up to their expectations, even if they were there just to check it out before going to Merrill's Halloween dance.

Lower Jon Chen voiced his positive reaction to the event. “All around, it was a really great way to spend part of the night and meet new people. With its multiple jump scares and the creepy atmosphere of the basement, the whole event was actually scarier that I thought it was going to be,” Chen said.

Many students also found their visit to the asylum to be more than just a social gathering. For them, the event was a chance for them to escape into the spirit of Halloween, even if it was just for a short walk down the decorated basement hallway.

As lower Emily Green said, “It was really nice to just forget about the work I had due Monday, and worry, instead, about whether or not someone was about to pop out of the closet that I was walking past.”

Many of the other attendees agreed with Green and added that it was a really great way to just let loose for a while during the middle of the term.

While the attendance of the event was stellar, as de La Bruyere said, she wished that the asylum was an even larger, scarier production than it already was. “The asylum itself was pretty short. It only spanned down half of the hallway, and the whole experience at most lasted around three or four minutes. I thought it was a bit of a let down for this reason, especially considering all of the hype surrounding the event.”

However, despite the few complaints, students found the event to be a success overall. Many look forward to next year’s iteration, hoping that it even builds upon the positive changes seen this year. Green praised the asylum and its contribution to the festive atmosphere felt on campus last Saturday,

“The asylum, in conjunction with the dance, really added to the whole embodiment of the Halloween spirit seen here on campus, which I think helped many of the students divert their attention from the constant schoolwork,” Green said. “Overall, it was a really fun way to spend a small bit of my Saturday night with my friends, and get a bit scared in the process.”