By: Caitlin Fletcher

Saturday, Oct. 8, the Dart followed haunted house rookie, junior Alex Jackson, through “The Beast”.

Within the first five minutes Jackson walked into the darkness of “The Beast” and an actor popped out from behind a door. Jackson responded by screaming, turning around and basically tackling her friend standing behind her.

“It was really scary, I had no idea what to expect,” Jackson said.

As she walked through the rest of the maze she lost her way a few times causing her to become even more scared by whatever, or whoever, may be popping out at her next. There were people sitting on walls surprising the unexpected haunted house goers below.

“That really got me, I didn’t expect someone to be sitting on top of a wall,” Jackson said.

Jackson admits the actors in the haunted house added to the experience. As she walked through the house some actors attempted to scare while others sat and laughed as she got even more lost than she had been.

“One guy stood in a room that we were in for probably fifteen minutes and just laughed at everyone while we were all confused by where we should go next,” Jackson said.

Eventually they made there way out of that room, which had no lighting so no one could see. The darker the room the harder it became for Jackson to find a way out.

“Rooms would get darker and you couldn’t see doorways or tiny, low to the ground spaces that you could get out of the room through,” Jackson said.

Not to mention the actors dressed so dark that they blended in with the walls so when Jackson passed she couldn’t tell they were there.

“They would pop out of the wall, and none of us even knew they were there, it was nerve-racking,” Jackson recalled.

It wasn’t always people scaring Jackson, sometimes it was mechanical clowns, set on a timer, that popped out like a jack-in-the box when someone turned the corner.

“I thought it was going to hit me in the face, and I did not expect it to be there at all,” Jackson said.

The actors in the haunted house surprised her after they popped out from behind doors and in and on top of walls. Mechanical clowns surprised her when they almost hit her in the face.

However, the one thing that got to her the most came after she slid down the long slide which runs from the top floor of “The Beast” to the bottom.

She reached the bottom of the slide and walked out after having been told it was all over and nothing was going to be surprising her again. She walked past a wall and a group of three of her friends jumped out at her from behind a wall.

“I almost had a heart attack, that was so scary,” Jackson said.

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