Prentiss-Lucas Hall hosted the annual Haunted Floor Halloween event on Oct. 31. Winona State University students lined up outside the building despite the cold, many in Halloween costumes, and waited to enter the spooky building that RA’s and residence life worked hard to create.
A lot of preparation goes into this event each year. Tricia Angus, Sheehan Hall Area Coordinator, was in charge of organizing and coordinating with the RAs to plan this event. According to Angus, each RA is assigned a room in groups in Prentiss-Lucas and they get to design and plan what theme and story for the room is. Angus is in charge of reaching out to the RAs and making sure that their rooms are going according to plan.
“Last year we had over 500 students and people attend… from that I learned that it takes a lot more coordination to pull this off,” Angus said. “We also started a new system to get other student volunteers—nursing students who need volunteer hours or just anybody who wants to be spooky in a Halloween costume can volunteer to help out as well.”
Angus says that the RAs have been thinking about what theme they want for their room since training week back in August. “We’ve got a werewolf theme, a vampire theme, a creepy butcher shop sort of thing. And then they’ve been thinking about how many actors they need and where to put them.”
“It’s a great time for students to be able to get out of their room and try something totally different because we don’t really have anything else like this on campus really,” Angus says. Since Halloween was on a Friday, this provided many students with something fun to do alternative to potentially risky behavior. “This is an evening activity where if you feel like you want to be active and involved, it can be a safe way to do that versus going to other activities off of campus,” Angus notes.
Sheehan RA and third-year student Lane Waller is one of the RAs helping put on this event. “We plan it, kind of like, who’s going to wear what, be in what costumes, what scary decorations we’re going to have in a room—like cobwebs, putting all the bloody-splattered curtains up and everything, making all the lights dark, and then putting on a show for you guys,” Waller describes. “Some participants, they come through, and they’re all confident, like, oh, you guys aren’t scary. And then other ones, yeah—they genuinely get scared sometimes.”
This event brought spooky and safe Halloween fun to the Winona State campus, and hopefully it will continue to remain a tradition for years to come.
