For just one day, fear in the Eastern Star Home reaches a high and tales of haunted classrooms and monsters come to life. Halloween at Archer has arrived.

For many, the Archer Halloween experience is encapsulated by the annual haunted house, designed and run by the senior class. But in reality, the process of planning the haunted house starts long before then.

Back in August, on Orientation, the seniors gather and create different committees to organize the year’s events, including the haunted house.

“When I think of Archer Halloween traditions, the first thing that comes to mind is the seniors creating the haunted house. This is my seventeenth year here, and it is something that has been done every single year,” English Department Chair and teacher Brian Wogensen said. “There are so many iterations of it. I love how it brings the senior class together in a collective endeavor.”

The haunted house committee is comprised of about 30 seniors, led by a student leadership team, Reed Farley — Arts Department Chair and teacher — and Wogensen.

The senior class collectively chose their theme for the haunted house on Senior Day, and since then has met weekly to plan for the haunted house.

“Our grade has been looking forward to planning the Haunted House pretty much since middle school, so coming up with the theme and agreeing upon it as a grade wasn’t difficult,” student leader Audrey Koh ’17 wrote in an email.

Each advisory helps to plan an aspect of the haunted house, but the leaders plan the overall trajectory of the house.

“This is ultimately an incredible way to get involved with your grade,” student leader Stella Gage ’17 wrote in an email. “Have fun together, embrace it.”

Set up for the event began after school on Oct. 28, but the seniors try to keep the theme and location of the haunted house a secret until Halloween day.

“[The haunted house] transforms different places of the school. In recent years, it’s been in the art hallway or blackbox.” Wogensen said. “We’ve even done it in the Barrington House, where it was turned into an insane asylum.”

Ultimately students have final say on the haunted house, but faculty provide guidance as necessary.

“How the haunted house works is very much a secret until you’re a senior, not intentionally, but people don’t talk about all the work that goes into it,” student leader Eloise Rollins-Fife ’17 said. “[Teachers] provide insight into what grades have done in the past and how we can use that to make things work in the space [we] have.”

According to Rollins-Fife, parts of this year’s haunted house were altered after Samantha Coyne Donnel, Director of Upper School, expressed concerns over potentially terrifying connections to the real world.

“We made the decision to keep elements of the initial theme, but changed parts she was most concerned about. Now we have a slightly altered theme, but it is very much in the same vein as we started with,” she said.

The haunted house serves as a rite of passage for seniors at Archer, as it is a tradition almost as old as the school itself.

“It’s always been the senior class putting the haunted house together,” Wogensen said. “They have the challenge of having to make something scary to different grade levels in different ways.”

Because the seniors design and run the haunted house, they themselves are unable to go through it.

“Although I’m sad I won’t get to go to the Haunted House as a regular Archer girl,” Koh said, “running it will probably be the highlight of all of my Halloweens at [Archer] thus far.”

The haunted house itself is bittersweet for many seniors.

“It’s definitely a signifier that everything is coming to an end,” Rollins-Fife said.