Pemberton Hall Council’s Middleton Manor Haunted House was open to the public to collect donations for HOPE Friday and Saturday night.

At Middleton Manor, attendees were taken in groups by a leader through a hallway downstairs at Pemberton Hall where student volunteers did their best to rattle the house guests.

Admission was $2 a person, and all of the money gathered at the haunted house is donated to HOPE, a nonprofit coalition against domestic violence. 

Erin Zurek, a sophomore majoring in communication disorders and sciences and Spanish, was dressed up to scare attendees at Middleton Manor.

“I’m an RA in the building, so (Friday night) I helped with tours, so I brought people through the haunted house,” she said, “and (on Saturday) I’m spooking people. I’m very spooky.”

Josh Gostlin, a social criminal justice major from Central Michigan University, volunteered to collect donations for Middleton Manor.

Knowing that all proceeds from Middleton Manor go to HOPE made volunteering a no-brainer, Gostlin said.

How much work the student volunteers put into Middleton Manor was astounding on both nights, he said, and working with them made it a rewarding experience.

“I really wanted to make sure I was supporting the staff (and) the hall council; I wanted to make sure I was supporting HOPE as much as possible,” he said. “For me, I like the idea of everyone all coming together for a bigger purpose and trying to give something back to the community.”

Gostlin said sometimes student volunteer work like Middleton Manor goes unappreciated or unnoticed by a lot of people, but they deserve all of the credit for making the annual Haunted House possible.

“I would really like to give a shout out to all the volunteers,” he said, “because they sacrificed a lot to make sure Middleton Manor (is) the best it can be, and I definitely think that we are raising a lot of money because of their efforts.”

Robyn Heitman, a senior music education major, said she was one of the student volunteers for the annual Pemberton Haunted House back when she was a freshman.

She said the biggest difference in performance she noticed was the severity of the noise in the hall.

“I remember (the Haunted House) being very loud when I did it. People were running around and screaming, but (Middleton Manor) was more like jump scares,” she said. “Everything was quiet and you didn’t expect (the jump scares).”

When Heitman volunteered, she said she dressed herself in an old hospital gown that once belonged to her grandmother to portray an inhabitant of a haunted insane asylum.

She said in order to accurately look the part of a sickly insane patient, she had to tease and frizz out her hair and use dark makeup around her eyes.

Her method of scaring attendees was to stand awkwardly in a corner of a room in the Haunted House, saying and doing nothing and then suddenly pointing and sprinting at the guests, she said.

Heitman said she thinks the scariest part of Middleton Manor was when a mother inserted herself right next to the crowd of attendees passing through the hall, staring at them intently with her child in her arms.

“One of the (performing volunteers) had a baby, and it was crying,” she said. “It looked like it was like a bloodied baby. That was pretty scary.”

Logan Raschke can be reached at 581-2812 or at [email protected].