The Class of 2018 gave the Archer community a glimpse into an alternate past of the Eastern Start Home on Oct. 31, filled with hospital beds, patients and nurses. Screams and grim music echoed throughout the school as the community waited to walk through the basement halls and Blackbox to see what the senior class created for the annual haunted house.

The experience began with a seance in the Blackbox. From there, student tour guides took each group through the art hallway, where troubled patients would pop out. As the groups walked through the basement, historical pictures of Archer were displayed, depicting the once housed in the building.

“I wouldn’t say it’s historically accurate, but I think we did do a good job,” senior Sophie Evans-Katz, a haunted house board member, said. “We incorporated real pictures into the slideshow…That was a good way to incorporate the actual history of Archer. It was a nod to the past.”

The haunted house imagined insane doctors experimenting on old women that inhabited the home.

“It makes it a little more scary knowing [what] could have been,” senior Sydney Shintani, another organizer said. “If people don’t know what [the Eastern Star Home] was actually used for, it could be possible. The realistic aspect of [the haunted house] made it more scary.”

Although the haunted house’s storyline was imaginary, it still gave people a good scare, students said.

“It was a lot more scary than other ones I have been in,” Daisy Swirsky ‘23 said. “I never knew when it was going to end. It was also scary because it related to Archer. It showed a different side of school that we don’t usually hear or talk about.”

Not only did middle-schoolers find it scary, but high-schoolers also said that they left the haunted house with an unsettling feeling.

“The scariest part about this haunted house was how it was so centralized around the Archer history and how connected I felt. We are actually in the same place as some of these things [could] have happened,” Stella Gregg ‘20 said. “It felt real.”