Donald Keough, News Editor–
Creepy halloween decorations, ghoulish impersonators and shrill screams filled Doane Library this past weekend during the fifth annual Haunted Library Tours. This year’s tours were called “ESCAPE The Haunted Library Tours” becuase of the variety of puzzles and escape room inspired games included.
From Oct. 25-26, the library hosted 30 minute tours from 5-10 p.m, which took visitors to locations normally off-limits, including the archival fifth floor, the faculty lounge and the roof.
“Getting to go up to the rooftop was great,” John Platt ‘26 said. “Seeing the rooms across the library that you usually aren’t able to see, like the faculty room, was also great.”
The stops also included a variety of puzzles that participants attempted to solve. These puzzles revolved around murder mysteries sprinkled with parts of the library’s history. Platt, who also went on one of the tours last year, thought these puzzles were more in-depth this year.
“I remember last year was informational, but this year it was more about using our brain and unraveling clues, which I thought was pretty cool,” Platt said. “When we had to use different hints like when we had to figure out who killed each other in what order, or when we put together a skeleton, were some of my favorite parts.”
Brielle Coleman ‘27 participated in the tour, and had originally done the tour as a first-year. She also agreed saying that she enjoyed the new puzzles.
“I thought it was a lot better [compared] to my freshman year,” Coleman said. “I enjoyed the puzzle system that they had, and I thought it was a lot more interactive than my freshman year.”
Coleman also said that she thought her tour guide, Beronica Avila, the Outreach & Engagement Librarian, contributed to the haunting atmosphere.
“They had a lot of good information and they made it kind of scary,” Coleman said, saying she thought the story time they had which included different parts of the library’s history was also interesting.”
Around a dozen students, as well as some faculty members and their families, took each tour. Most tours, especially during the evening, were full by the end of the night. Coleman, who went on the tour with a group of friends, added to the experience.
“It was cool just hanging out with my friends and walking around the library and seeing the actors,” Coleman said. “Overall, the student actors and the tour guide were great.”
She also noted that she thought the decorations were more elaborate this year.
“The decorations were a lot more improved from freshman year,” Coleman said. “It really had a nice atmosphere to it. They gave me the chills.”
The mastermind behind the decorations was Kent Huffman ’96, a library associate who is part of the circulation team. He begins planning the tours at the beginning of the summer, and starts setting up decorations about a week in advance.
“I used to try to do it so it was just the weekend of the event,” Huffman said. “I would just set everything up like crazy on Friday and tear it all down on Sunday. But I’ve learned that’s not feasible.”
He also said he thinks setting up earlier may help “build the hype” for students. Some of the decorations come from his own possessions, such as movie posters which were used this year. He also made 3D printed gravestones for one of the puzzle rooms.
“[The grave stones] are actually modeled from Disney’s Haunted Mansion, the attraction, which has always been one of my big inspirations for this,” Huffman said. “I wanted to model the whole tour on Disney’s Haunted Mansion or Tim Burton’s movies or the old Scooby Doo cartoons. That’s kind of the vibe that I go for for this.”
This year, Huffman added more puzzles which he hoped would make the tour a more hands-on experience.
“I wanted to do something a little more interactive, because for the four years previously, we just walked them around,” Huffman said. “We set up a lot of special effects, but there wasn’t a lot of interactivity. So I thought it might be fun to do something like a mini escape room around the library.”
In addition to last year’s tours, this year’s tour still featured a narrative which the tour guide led the visitors through.
“Storytelling is a big part of it, too, just to engage a tour group,” Huffman said. “If you can weave a narrative, it becomes a lot more engaging. So I always kind of start with that and try to build the tour around a central story or an idea.”
He also said that he tries to change the narrative every year so that the tours don’t feel repetitive. Rachel Krak, another library associate, said that she thinks this narrative helps add to the experience.
“We love to see the students interact and get a piece of the history of the library, then being able to mix in all the fun ghosts and scares,” Krak said.
Krak also said that these tours are Huffman’s passion.
“He’s so into it,” Krak said.
After the tours had finished, Avila said that she enjoyed getting to interact with the visitors as a tour guide.
“It’s one of the few events where our faculty come and they bring their family, so you get to see new faces and have nice interactions.” Avila said.
Last year, Avila also helped run the library tours. She said another way that this tour differed was the number of visitors, as the last library tour event coincided with Big Red Weekend.
“I would just say the traffic of last year plus alumni was [a lot], where this one felt more controlled,” Avila said. “This one was like, ‘okay, we can all put our best foot forward,’ where with alumni, we still do, but it’s just a little bit more exhausting.”
Even with less traffic, Huffman said that they had more people registered for the tours this year than any other year.
“I think it was really successful,” Huffman said. “We had more people in the building [last year], but we also had more going on, like we had tarot readers and a couple other activities that we didn’t have this year just because of the puzzles.”
Juan Arevalo ‘27, who works as one of the social media marketing assistants for the library, was one of the actors on Oct. 26. He said that he enjoyed getting to play his role, which included blowing an Aztec death whistle when students reached the fifth floor.
“It was a lot of fun, I got to scare a lot of people,” Arevalo said. “My favorite part was with a group of seniors, when we improvised by banging all over the place and by turning off some of the candles to make it even more dark. I whistled so hard I was surprised by how loud it got.”
