Loyola students and faculty dig down deep to recall their most terrifying or amusing Halloween blunders.

Ghost stories, scary movies, embarrassing moments and haunted houses: what else could we be talking about?

Halloween is just around the corner. With this candy-frenzied and costume-seeking filled air, how could we disregard the scary stories and anecdotes our fellow Loyola community members have to tell?

Originally, the goal was to get as many bone chilling experiences as our audience had to share, but in the end, it was those funny blooper-type moments that we all seem to treasure.

“My birthday is Oct. 31, so I always thought kids would trick or treat because it was my birthday,” philosophy freshman Cullen Smith said.

But some Halloween experiences left students feeling a little trapped.

“There was a haunted house, the kind you pay to get in and take a tour, but no one was at the door so my friends Rebecca Gonzalez, (philosophy junior), made us sneak in,” graphic design senior Eliza Schulze said.

“Once we were in there we took the tour on our own. We ended up at this back door and thought we could just sneak back out, but it was locked. We had to walk all over the haunted house again looking for the exit and ended up having to leave through the front door.”

But not all stories were fun and games. Andy Gaudet, music industry studies freshman, had a real ghost story to tell.

“My house used to be haunted,” Gaudet said. “Once I was watching TV and there was a closet next to it. Suddenly the closet door fell on top of me. Then, on Halloween night my sister was sleeping in her bunk bed and woke up because the ladder from the bed was on top of her. Even my parents admitted hearing chains outside their door while they slept.

Eventually after some investigation we found out my aunt lived in my house before and turns out both her maid and her were murdered. We had a priest come in and exorcise our house. It’s been better since then.”

And don’t think that since some faculty can be frightening in class, that they can’t have some scary stories of their own.

English professor Jennifer Shimek said, “director Wes Craven’s “The Last House on the Left” from 1972 is a film I will never watch again. I find it scary because of the sadistic torture of the two kidnapped girls in the film and the brutalization of human beings in it. And I like horror films and Craven as a director.”

“I’m not really a Halloween ‘scary’ stuff person,” Phyllis Aleman, administrative assistant in the School of Mass Communication said. “In my younger years I did go to a couple of ‘scary’ Halloween haunts which I would never do again, (like) a haunted house done by a local Elks Lodge and a scary corn maze in the Baton Rouge area.”

School of Mass Communication Assistant Professor Valerie Andrews said, “I don’t tend to watch scary movies because I’m a scaredy cat. There are non-Halloween movies that are scary, though. I think “Wait Until Dark” with Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman terrorized by drug dealers is one of the scariest movies ever made. And I’ve seen it three or more times. Also, the original “Carrie” with Sissy Spacek is one movie that kept me awake the entire night after I saw it. That hand coming up out of the ground … It still gives me chills.

Halloween brings along more than just trick or treating and heavy partying. It’s always fun to hear what our readers have to say, and hopefully, this Halloween is full of even more stories to tell.

Alexia Barrail can be reached at [email protected].