Residential Housing Association transformed the Callahan Hall basement into a creepy, spine-chilling nursing home for the third annual Callahan Hall Haunted House Thursday Oct. 21.

Before Callahan Hall was a part of Northern Kentucky University, it was Lakeside Place, a nursing home. Lakeside Place was eventually shut down.

“Patients were mistreated,” said President of RHA and Honors Wing Activities Director Ashley Pyles. RHA saw the creepy potential in Callahan’s basement and “thought it would be a great idea for a haunted house.”

To begin the tour of the haunted basement, a guide led guests into the elevator that opened up to the dark, eerie hallway where a senior patient begged for his life from the evil nurse. As guests made their way through the rest of the basement, dozens of deranged patients pleaded for safety to the sane passerby.

The fright level was definitely high, according to sophomore Kelsey Kloentrup, but it was still fun.

Junior psychology major Samantha Durbin also thought the scare was up to par. “For a little dorm thing, I’m not going to lie,” she said. “It was pretty scary.”

RHA teamed up with different organizations to help decorate and participate for the first time this year and it was a great success according to Pyles. “We had a great group of really dedicated, hard-working and talented students.”

The walk through the basement included an expansion in storyline and length, allowing guests to cover twice the area of previous years.

Campus organizations that helped with the haunted house included: the Presidential Ambassadors, Phi Sigma Sigma, the Honors Wing at Callahan Hall, Freshman Service Leadership Committee, Student Anthropology Society and the College Democrats.

Each organization took a different section of the basement and storyline to create what Pyles said was the scariest haunted house yet.

For the manly man, like Adam Mitchell, a sophomore graphic design major, it was really just entertaining. “It was cute,” he said as he laughed at his walking partner Durbin whose fear of the basement cracked Mitchell up.

Story by Claire Higgins