Editor's note: This article is a humor column.
What began as a sunny, serene Saturday afternoon quickly turned into an unexpected scene of chaos as a bouncy castle in the front yard of a fraternity collapsed, nearly engulfing two University first-years.
This weekend, students gathered in the front yard of a fraternity to cool off from the relentless 3 p.m. heat. They lined up for turns on the multi-story high water slide. They raced to climb up the inflatable ladder on the left and shoot down on the right into a small basin. It was a blissful scene — carefree students sliding into a pool of water adorned with two inflatable palm trees. A crowd formed in the pool at the bottom of the slide as students desperately wanted to avoid the sour feeling of wet clothes and cowboy boots outside of the water. In short, students channeled their inner child.
As students grew impatient to ride the slide, a long queue formed on the ladder. The entrance to the slide continued to get more clogged, and the weight of the students put enormous pressure on the inflatable structure.
Unable to bear this pressure, the slide fell onto its side, folding in on the ladder portion of the structure. The last passengers flailed down the slide headfirst, making a narrow escape from the mishap. However, two first-year University students who were climbing the ladder were not so lucky — as the slide folded in on itself, these two woebegone first-year students plummeted.
The force of the crowd in the pool kept the base of the slide against the ground, leaving the structure folded in half on its side. Multiple students watched completely baffled from the pool, feeling lucky to have narrowly avoided the incident.
"We saw the slide cave in on itself and slowly topple to the side, and we all just started screaming," one first-year Paul Maury said.
The two students that fell, first-year College students Anne Davis and Tom Clark, reported a mildly traumatic scene.
"As I was falling backwards from 15 feet up, I gripped Tom’s arm and closed my eyes because I thought I was about to meet my maker," Davis said.
"I just remember being struck suddenly, and then screaming ‘ANNE, WE'RE GOING DOWN’" Clark recalled with horror.
As Davis plunged from the top, Clark followed suit, pancaking her onto the pavement. Both were sandwiched between the bouncy castle and the ground.
"Suddenly I was on my back on the ground… and the only way out was slithering out face first," Davis reported.
In an act of tremendous courage and self-preservation, the students were able to squeeze their way from under the structure, coming up for air against the wet pavement.
Some of the event hosts acted quickly and came to the rescue — a group of fraternity brothers lifted Davis up off of the pavement to ensure no one was seriously injured and, more importantly, that there would be no lawsuit on their hands. When the student was hoisted back onto her feet, her facial lacerations were revealed. The brothers ran back into the house to grab supplies from a closet and got to work on Davis' wounds.
Other students, possessed by a Good Samaritan spirit, worked together to lift the bouncy house back up. The crowd did not let the collapse dampen their spirits. Irritated by the interruption, a line had already formed again as soon as the castle was even slightly adjusted from its horizontal position against the ground.
By some miracle, the fallen students left the scene relatively unscathed, with Davis just having mild battle scars scattered on her face, and Clark reportedly just being sore the next morning.
"I honestly trusted the security of the bouncy house," Clark said. "The slide was tightly secured by shoelaces tied to the bushes along the yard afterall."
The fraternity offered the victims compensation with a permanent spot on their DoorList.
"With the DoorList invite," Clark said, "honestly, I don't mind falling from the sky. Any lengths to collect those DoorLists. They are priceless in this economy."
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