The Allegheny Ghost Club and Gator Activities Programming collaborated to host a haunted house in Oddfellows Hall on Thursday, Oct. 27 from 9:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Attendees gathered at the lobby of the Oddfellows building and were asked by AGC members to form groups, as participants would enter the haunted house in batches of six to twelve.
The designated waiting area for participants offered refreshments, such as fruit punch, to attendees as they waited for their turn to experience the haunted house.
“We decided to send people into the haunted house in groups so that we would not suffer from overcrowding,” AGC President Alex Hopkins, ’24, said. “The group method was also sensible since we had a tour guide accompanying the group and narrating the story behind our theme.”
The theme of the haunted house was “secret society/cult” and was inspired by the location of the haunted house, according to Hopkins.
“When we decided that Oddfellows was the place, we naturally gravitated towards a cult theme because of the mystery and history of the building,” Hopkins said.
Attendees entered the haunted house with a tour guide to explore and observe the lives of deceased and living members of the secret society that have and are currently occupying Oddfellows.
“The idea was that each different room that the participants went into, they would start to sense that something was wrong,” Hopkins said. “Then, at the end of the tour, there is a finale in which the sense of something wrong turns to reality, you realize that you’ve walked into a cult and now you’re either a member or about to be sacrificed”
Two tour guides, AGC members Sasha Lu, ’25, and Thia Ferderbar, ’26, worked on a rotational basis and improvised on what route they would take their tour.
Before beginning their tour, participants were given the option to consent to actors in the haunted house to touch them as part of the act. Participants who consented were provided with a glow-in-the-dark band to communicate their consent to the actors.
The tour began with participants going down the Oddfellow basement which was decorated with spider webs and fake blood stains. The lighting was very faint and impromptu noises were made by actors to scare the participants. Hopkins said that this part of the tour intended to make participants feel the presence of spirits.
Participants then left the basement via the back exit and walked across the Oddfellows parking lot.
“The reason the tour featured the walk through the garden in the Oddfellows parking lot was so that participants could walk over the garden that has been fertilized by the remains of the society members that have moved on from this world,” Hopkins said.
The tour then took the participants into the first-floor hallway of Oddfellows where they were confronted by a room from which loud noises were heard but had no occupants. Participants were encouraged to explore the room and encountered strange objects such as eerie photos and wasted pieces of paper.
At the end of the first-floor hallway, a wounded actor crawled out of a room to ask participants for help before frantically retreating into the room.

The tour then continued up the stairwell and onto the second-floor hallway where an actor would come out of hiding to jump-scare the participants. The second-floor hallway also contained a room in which a fake dead body of a former society member was found along with books, candles and a dagger.
Towards the end of the second-floor hallway, participants came across a room in which two actors were in the middle of a sacrificial ceremony. The actor conducting the sacrifice was vocal and humorously interacted with the audience saying, “What are you staring at?” and “Get out of my sacrifice room.”
The final room of the tour was a pitch-black room in which all actors involved in the tour congregated to “welcome” the participants into the cult or “take them to their final resting place,” according to Hopkins.
The tour concluded with the tour guide leading the participants back into the Oddfellows lobby where they were greeted by AGC staff.
A majority of the actors were members of AGC, but many volunteered via outreach, according to Hopkins.
GAP Director of Marketing and Social Media Zula Stenger, ’25, said that GAP’s main contribution to the event was providing volunteers and promotion whereas all the other work was managed by AGC.
“AGC reached out to us earlier in the semester because they wanted to utilize GAP’s extensive social media outreach and because we have plenty of members that frequently volunteer for events,” Stenger said. “GAP was pleased with the event and the idea and we were more than happy to collaborate.”
Hopkins said that AGC began planning for the event long ago, with initial talks being held during the spring 2022 semester in May. He added that planning for the event continued during the summer and at the start of the fall 2022 semester.
“Our first meeting as a club after getting back onto campus for this year was talking about the haunted house,” Hopkins said. “The involvement fair was when we decided completely that we were going to have a haunted house and so about three months of planning have gone into the event.”
Hopkins believed the event to be a success due to the high student turnout. He added that diligently handling an event is important for AGC given it is a newer organization on campus.
“We were only officially founded last year and this event was the perfect way for us to announce ourselves to the campus,” Hopkins said. “I’m also happy with the timing of the event, we really wanted to give everyone a memorable Halloween experience.”
Stenger, who also attended the event, agreed with Hopkins.
“I hope to see more events like this and hopefully next time AGC will have a higher budget to make the haunted house even better,” Stenger said.
Hopkins said that although AGC is unlikely to hold another event this semester of the same proportions as the haunted house, the club will still be holding smaller, more intimate events in the coming future.
“For the time being, we’re going to have a bunch of smaller events like paranormal investigations around campus,” Hopkins said. “We have plans to collaborate with other clubs as well, if clubs have bigger events that they would like us to be a part of, we’re all in.”