Our first event was the larger of the two as we decided to host a haunted house/haunted trail evening for local college students at Glen Eden Pilot park. We very fortunate to work with some volunteers with the city of Raleigh along with a few of our friends to pull off this spooky evening. Guests first checked in at our welcome table before following the trail behind the main building where they were scared by some hidden decorations and people around the trail. Eventually our guests ended up inside a creepy room within the main building where we had many fun games and Halloween themed activities set up.
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1.) We wanted to host a haunted trail/haunted house event on October 25th where NC State Students can meet at least three new people while in attendance, specifically while participating in our Halloween activities in the bottom room of Glen Eden Pilot Park.
2.) We wanted to provide an opportunity for NC State students to learn at least one new thing about Raleigh Parks and Recreation and what it has to offer before they leave our event, and provide resources for them to also get involved with Raleigh Parks and Rec if they are interested.
3.) As our event was meant to be a scary experience, we wanted to provide a fun way for State students to take a break from midterms while getting their heart rate up to 170bpm, which is the very top of a typical target heart rate range for someone in their 20's, while they are walking through the haunted trail.
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Bella
Jimmy
Rachel
I had an absolute blast planning and running our Haunted House event. I focused more on the marketing side of things by creating an Instagram and Twitter account to advertise our event and it was so awesome to learn about how useful hashtags and a theme are etc. (which helped us get reposted by a Raleigh events page!). On the night of our actual program I got to see how much fun our participants were having and capture plenty of content. Working with Jimmy and Bella this semester has been great, and it was incredible to see what we came up with even with limited supplies and some last-minute major changes as my other group members discussed.
Program planning has been something I’ve been interested in for a while now (since last year), and being able to not just plan two programs but actually put on two programs was definitely an experience I’m grateful to have had. .
The haunted trail was a very sweet and sour experience for me. I absolutely love Halloween and all things spooky, so once we had the idea for this program, I was automatically on board. Planning a program for college students was honestly a bit intimidating though and I was quite nervous about how many people would come and if they would enjoy it or not. This anxiety about the turn out coupled with a lot of last minute changes, like having to change our planned trail the day before our event, was the “sour” part of this experience for me. But even with these challenges, I think I had the most fun planning and preparing for this event. I love going to haunted trails, like Fear Farm and Panic Point, and having some knowledge of how these events operate was definitely helpful. I ended up really enjoying setting up, running, and even cleaning up this event after all was said and done. We had a pretty solid turn out and a few of my friends were able to come out and see what we were doing, which was really nice. Seeing my friends and other college students enjoy themselves at our haunted trail was the “sweet” part of this experience for sure.
When we were planning for the haunted house I learned very quickly that things won't always go according to plan. My group would meet at either Jaycee Community Center or at Glen Eden Park. In our planning we were able to divide and conquer tasks based on our own expertise. For example, as a finance major I worked on the budget sheet, Rachel knew a lot about editing and creating video content for our social media accounts as well as creating a flier. Lastly, Bella is very good with art so she was able to create some posters that we put on display at our event. We worked together to decide what the haunted house would look like but the day prior to our event we were notified that we were no longer able to use the majority of our trail so we had to adapt and shorten our trail. Our site supervisor somewhat dropped the ball by forgetting to get the decorations that I sent him, but he was able to find other halloween decorations last minute. Inside of the building we decided to have carnival games which including an ax throwing game (plastic axes), ring toss, popping balloons that were taped to the wall and filled with fake blood, a station where people could feel “brains'' (spaghetti), “eyes” (grapes), and “fingers” (baby carrots), and we also have a photo station with props. During the event we had a surplus of volunteers, with volunteers stay at the front desk where people signed in, we had volunteers as scarers in the haunted trail (myself and Bella were scarers), and volunteers managing the carnival game stations, and lastly Rachel was behind the camera taking footage of our event and interviewing some participants. I thought the haunted trial was a major success. We had a good group of people who showed up, and a great group of volunteers. I also had a lot of fun being able to scare people, especially spooking my friends that showed up.
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We all learned a lot from our Haunted Trail program because this was our first program and we decided to go big or go home. Usually people start with an easier program plan first and for their second program they go with a harder program to pull off, like one without a captive audience (college students), so they can build up to it and gain some program planning experience first. We however, decided to disregard this because we really wanted to do a scary haunted trail in time for Halloween so we kind of jumped in head first without knowing what was at the end. Thankfully, everything turned out okay and we had a successful first program. We learned a lot, and I mean a lot, about rolling with the punches and adapting to any challenges that got thrown our way. The day before our program we learned we weren’t allowed to use the greenway, which is where our trail was supposed to be, so we had to do a 180 and scratch our original trail plan. We also had a few hiccups with ordering supplies for our trail and learned how to make do with what we had on hand and what we could borrow from other community centers in the area.