Halloween is just around the corner, and the Charlottesville area offers plenty of seasonal attractions for students: apple picking at Carter’s Mountain, Trick-or-Treating on the Lawn, and, of course, paying a visit to Brown College’s Hauntings on the Hill.
This past Friday and Saturday, Brown College opened its haunted house from 8 p.m. to midnight. The event, called Hauntings on the Hill, is hosted annually for charity.
Each year, the haunted house — constructed under a large tent on Monroe Hill — takes on a different theme. This year’s theme was Willie Wahoo and the Brownie Factory, inspired by the 1971 movie, “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.”
“It was more or less an excuse to do some candy-based horror and terror,” said Oliver Lopez-Gomez, a second year in the College and a co-chair of Hauntings within the Brown Governance Board.
The event was run mostly by volunteers from Brown College. Jobs included room leaders, actors, tour guides, pushers and plants. Pushers monitored the back of the groups, making sure everything was going on pace and no one group took too much time. Plants snuck into various group and isolated individuals to scare them even more.
Guides led visitors through a series of rooms each with their own candy-based horror vinnet. One room featured the cartoon character Gumby in a tortuous medieval stretch machine. Another showed mad Wonka scientists transforming students into berries and extracting their juices. Half way through the experience was a recreation of the most infamous scene from “Willy Wonka” — the haunting boat ride — with a continuous loop of the movie scene in the background.
The house took two weeks to set up, but volunteers have been planning the event for two months.
“Every year, our co-chairs sit down and discuss a few theme ideas,” Lopez-Gomez said. “Then, we present them to the Brown community through an email listserv. Everyone in the community suggests ideas and we more or less come to a consensus as a community and then go over the more viable options and choose from there.”
Tickets were $5 per person, or $9 for two people. This year’s sales are projected to be more than $8,000 — the house made $8,600 last year.
All proceeds benefited The Haven, which operates a multi-resource day shelter for the homeless in downtown Charlottesville. The Haven provides a centralized location for resource providers, a commercial kitchen, a day haven, a community garden, and a cultural and arts space downtown.
Brown has been holding haunted houses for charity for almost 25 years. For some, the house has become something of a tradition, and is even included on the Fourth-Year Trustee’s list of 115 things to do before you graduate.
“Haunting is a lot of fun,” Lopez-Gomez said. “It’s something that I think has become part of the U.Va. experience, and if you haven't checked it out, you definitely should."
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