Welcome home, fellow struggling Monashians! New sem, new you but same old routine of dreading to get out of bed to sit in a lecture you only have a 5-minute attention span for and trying to decide on a place for lunch knowing you’d end up eating in the school’s cafeteria anyway (Thank god for the food trucks and GrabFood, am I right?). It’s only the first week and I’m shagged. On the brighter side, there are many, and I mean many things to look forward to this semester! Elections and Monash Cup, I can smell the drama already.

Anyway, let me fill you in with what has happened so far this week. For the first time ever, MUSA Activities has organized a haunted house event to scare students back into the semester in conjunction with the Welcome Back Party. You wouldn’t have missed it because it was what everyone could talk about in the past week. Even if you think you missed it, the long line of people outside the badminton court last Wednesday? Yeah, that was the Haunted House.

I’m a big wuss when it comes to horror films, stories or anything really. But I enjoy going for these things, I don’t know why, but I just like scaring myself, ok? I think I just don’t want to be happy. Anyway, I brought along three of my supposedly gallant friends with me; one of them has a fear of butterflies, another is scared of my pet hedgehog and the last one’s afraid of his mother.

Before entering, a person with a face made up with the lips of The Joker told us a whole backstory of how the haunted house came into place, which I was too distracted to listen to because I was busy building up jitters in my head. Just before stepping into the ‘house’ I told myself one last time, “They’re not real”.

To be really honest, I was too scared sh*tless to remember most of what happened in there. But I’m going to try and describe it as much as I can. I remember being overwhelmed by darkness just as the door slammed shut behind us, I remember laughing at one of my friends who let out a very shrill scream when the first jump scare happened, I remember being embarrassed because the screaming continued all the way till the end, I remember warning the disguised ghosts to not touch me or else I would actually sucker punch someone, I remember crawling under something to get away from a Pennywise-looking man, I remember little girl ghosts and a man with a slit face, and I remember reaching the end and thinking it was over when a girl dressed as Valak jumped out of nowhere.

After exiting the haunted house, what better way to calm down than carbo-loading ourselves with free popcorn and cotton candy? Also, sitting on the field watching ‘A Quiet Place’ on a screen that looks like a bouncy castle. It was a movie starring John Krasinski, screenplayed by John Krasinski and directed by— oh wait who? John Krasinski. It was a great film to be watched outdoors, we weren’t annoyed with the sounds from the movie being muffled by white noise because well, there’s no sound in the movie to begin with.

With all the semester’s deadlines and schedules thrown to our faces in Week 1, we managed to catch a scary break with this whole haunted house shindig.  

Article by Pei Dee

Photos by Joseph and Mahrukh