A Delightfully Traumatic Halloween

In the week leading up to Halloween, I was shocked to be encouraged to build a haunted house that would scare the crap out of our little students. People are supposed to talk me out of letting my dark sense of humor run wild like that, not pay me to do it.

It's one thing at a college. When I was a housing adviser in the dorms, our dorm block decided that our semester activity would be a haunted house, and the resident adviser let me design it. To enter, we ushered our fellow students into an elevator, from which I had removed the lights. It went down to the lower floor, but it remained dark when the doors opened because the fire door was closed. That metal monstrosity swung open to reveal a room decked out in caskets and a fog machine. Another HA, dressed as a mental hospital doctor, lead the tour from there as the creepy soundtrack to American McGee's Alice leaked from one of the rooms. The hallway through the dorm was a maze of black garbage bags, and we planted people to grab at ankles as the tours navigated their way through.  The 'doctor' opened squeaky door into the bathroom, which had a bloody brain in the sink, blood hand prints dragged under a locked toilet stall, and a female HA dressed in a hospital gown crying in a fetal position under the running shower. The 'doctor' assured them all was as it should be and walked the tour further down the hallway. The common room was lit by a television set on static, which revealed two figures in masks sitting at a table covered in candy. One of the masked figures was stuffed as a scarecrow, and I was in the other one. Years of Halloween practice have given me the skill of lilting my head and controlling my breathing in order to appear to be a lifeless scarecrow, and the stuffing poking out of the ends of my sleeves helped. As when Trick or Treaters came to my house, I always let the first person to brave the figures grab candy without incident. The second person's hand was grasped by my gloved hand as they reached for the candy. Back in the hallway, I had propped open the actual door and put a wooden one in its place. I had hacked a hole in the wooden door with an ax, but the hole could be plugged back up with the cut out wood, so it looked whole. The masked figure outside could thus 'cut' a hole in the door with a single ax blow, and keep swinging as if trying to get in at the tour group. The tour exited the building through the stairwell doors, thinking that the haunted house was over. That's when the ax murder ran around the corner, brandishing his weapon for one final scare.

We didn't go quite that intense for the poor kindergarten and elementary school students, but I'm shocked at how far we did go. The owner of the branch set the tone by loaning us a rubber severed hand, which we strung up on the ceiling of a classroom and lowered down onto the heads of unsuspecting students.

The walls of the classroom were covered with black trash bags, as was a central area where several teachers hid to operate the surprises and to grab at their ankles as they passed. A teacher was even able to lay across a shelf in the wall behind the plastic sheeting and reach a hand out from what looked like the wall. Toilet paper hung like ripped rags from the ceiling. The creepiest bit may have been the doll stuffed in a kindergarteners' uniform that had a balloon head under its arm. Some teacher had managed to make the face utterly horrifying.

The haunted house was only a short loop around a single classroom, yet most of the three to six year old students were too terrified to even set foot inside, even when escorted by a teacher.

The teachers didn't look too scary  when the students could actually see us, though. All of the male teachers had put our names in a hat and drawn out someone else to buy a costume for from a website that sold $20 jumpers of various themes. I was a bunny. (Scott actually apologized when he saw it was mostly pink, but that didn't bother me).

Some of the other teachers bought costumes from the same place, including Becky, my co-teacher for our two kindergarten classes, who was a ladybug.

The teachers all gave the same PowerPoint presentation explaining the concept of Halloween to our students.

Then we carved pumpkins. I drew various eyes, noses, and mouths on the whiteboard and let the kids vote which ones we would use. Each student had to reach in and grab a scoopful of pumpkin guts, which they universally thought was gross instead of an exciting chance to get messy. Cultural differences, I guess.

Of course I did the actual carving part while the class' Korean teacher kept the kids occupied. Mostly she took pictures of all of their costumes.

Eddie had the coolest and most original costume of my classes, a sea captain.

Amy looked as elegant as ever as a witch, the opposite of her actual personality:

Princess costumes were quite popular among the girls. Here Rachel as Snow White manages to hide her hyperactive and distracted side to show how sweet she can be. 

My other kindergarten class joined us for the pumpkin carving. 

Between my two classes, we had a total of seven Spider Men.

The students from all classes eventually gathered to have a pumpkin carving competition.

Jack Skellington was a common inspiration for the other teachers, and I think their classes deservedly won.

Here's the one I carved:

I spotted the coolest costume at the school during the assembly, a dinosaur with awesome detail.

The afternoon classes watched some clips of scary movies, such as the Goosebumps show. We told them that a student had died in the haunted house classroom, and that's why it was closed. My favorite class had to meet in a different classroom because their usual space was filled with the haunted house. They all managed to find it, then were confused because I wasn't there when the bell rang. They weren't expecting me to be hidden behind the whiteboard. As you can see from the picture of me giving the PowerPoint, there is very little space back there, about one foot width on the side without the flatscreen TV. They actually started to ask if they should go look for me (they're such good kids!). That's when I slammed the white board the last few inches closed, making it look like it had moved by itself, then flung the whiteboard along its track and popped out, wearing a bunny suit and wielding a (fake) cleaver, laughing maniacally. They understandably thought I had gone utterly insane and were terrified for a moment. We spent the rest of the class telling scary stories. As a teacher I have gotten quite good and improvising frightening tales where it all turns out to be a prank or actually safe or funny in the end. I've also perfected the ponderous, ominous pacing that puts kids on the edge of their seats regardless of what I'm saying. Suffice it to say, they were scared witless at the climax of the story, especially when I mimed looking under the bed in a story (the girl in the story thought her parents might be dead under her creepy neighbor's bed, but they were actually hiding as a surprise for her birthday) and actually looked under the desk to grab a student's ankle and shout boo. Ah, the joys of frightening others...