Featuring music and dancing, carnival games, and a costume contest, on Oct. 18, the gym was transformed into a “Nightmare on Fern Street.” Hosted by SGA, the night’s main attraction was a “Demented Dreyfoos” themed haunted house. This new take on the creation of the Fall Dance began last year while brainstorming fall activities.

“The idea of having a fall dance came up when we were thinking about having a homecoming, but we figured not many people would go to that,” SGA Vice President and digital media junior Kristina Ronan said. “We assumed since Bak [Middle School of the Arts] had such high attendance at their Fall Thriller [Dance] that kids would want to come to our fall dance.”

Modeled after a ruined psychiatric hospital, the haunted house featured a short introduction video, student volunteer actors dressed in bloody gowns, tight corners and spaces, dead ends, strobe lights, and jump scares.

“I thought [the haunted house] showed Dreyfoos [students’] creativity and resourcefulness,” foreign language teacher Thomas Ruth said. “It’s a locker room and they transformed it into a super creepy, weird asylum gone wrong.”

Due to coinciding events, such as the College Fair, SGA only had a week to set up for the event, which made preparation “super stressful” for Ronan and other SGA members.

“The haunted house had a committee who would help us and stay after school to set up,” Ronan said. “We had many late nights after school every day during the week of the dance and Saturday attendance for setup and cleanup, but it was all worth it in the end.”

About $2,000 was raised from ticket sales, and all the funding will go toward student activities such as Spirit Week and next year’s Fall Dance. The approximate attendance was 400 students, which to Ronan, was an “overwhelming amount of kids.”

Originally, SGA had planned for the Fall Dance to include food trucks, but it was switched to catering from Papa John’s Pizza and Chick-fil-A last minute. One of Ronan’s hopes for next year’s Fall Dance is to be able to include the food trucks they had originally planned for.

“Next year I would like to make it on a different day so that we could actually get the food trucks and not let it be around the College Fair because that made it difficult for us to set up for the actual dance part,” Ronan said. “We plan to make the haunted house bigger and even more scary.”

Despite some of the challenges SGA faced during the planning of the Fall Dance, many students were supportive of the event.

“SGA did an amazing job at completely transforming the gym,” communications sophomore Jenelle Pollock said. “The lights, Halloween decorations, games, and music all contributed to the Fall Dance feel. It was so cool to see everyone in costume and just enjoy the fall atmosphere with my friends.”