HST 2015 Update #4 - THE HAUNTED HOUSE ON THE 17TH FLOOR!

Imagine halls filled with costumed adults roaming from room to room, carrying beer and bags filling up with candy. People you thought you knew, a few you've danced with.

Imagine hallways of hotel rooms re-decorated as dance-event-sponsored Halloween party rooms, each trying get you to attend their event by being the scariest, funniest, or most extravagantly decorated.

Imagine opening the door to Kyle, Sarah, Carter and Kyler's room to face a foyer transformed into a photobooth, with a table of candies and jello shots, and a huge frame with "SWINGCOUVER" written on it and a cut-out for you to poke your head in and have your picture taken.  

Imagine a makeshift Haunted House.

Can't be too scary, right? Can't do much with a hotel room.

Right?

No, not right.

Hotel rooms have heavy doors designed to shut out all light and screams.

Standing in the hall outside of this year's Haunted House is Jessica Cox, smiling to greet you, holding the door open just a crack. Who's scared of Jessica? Nobody. She's the sweetest thing, bubbly, always laughing, that cute little voice of hers.

Think again.

Jessica has an alter ego.

There she is at the door to greet you, so sweet and smiley, luring you in. "Hiiii!" she says with a hug, "Welcome!" All squeaky sunshine and bluebirds.

Then she turns her head to the door - in retrospect I think her head didn't turn, it swiveled, Excorcist-style - and she morphs into an Angry Gorilla, her mouth gaping open, as she bellows, "INCOMING! AAAANN-COME-AAAAAANG!" and SLAMS the door behind you.

You try to regaining your composure from the shock of being yelled at by Jessica Cox and realize you've walked into pitch blackness - the theoretical definition of the color black - and something is wisping against your face, a bird wing? Did they bring bats in here? You try to brush it off but it's already gone, and now you don't know where to go, where to take a step, because it's pitch black.

Someone shouts "MOVE FORWAAAARD!" so you edge three steps forward and -- SOMETHING GRABS YOUR LEG! IT'S A HAND! A COLD, STIFF, BLOODY HAND! You jump just about a mile straight up, screaming, which you had absolutely planned not to do, and now here you are embarrassing yourself and you consider reversing direction, walking backwards step by step in the dark, sheepishly backing out butt-first past Angry Gorilla and right back out into the lighted hall where if you're lucky you might be able to sneak down to your own room without anyone noticing and where you will then remain for the rest of the weekend.

But you can't, you just can't, you can't embarrass yourself like that. People will talk, this is the dance community. You started this and now you have to finish, there's no way around it.

So you creep one tiny step at a time. The problem is you keep running into walls only they're not solid, they're ghostly waving kinds of walls that try to suffocate you if you walk too close. And things keep floating past your face and neck, and wafting against your arms and legs.

Every time you stop and freeze voices shout at you "TURN LAAAAAFTTT! TURN RIIIIGHT!"

You stare into the blackness placing one foot then the next, searching the darkness for any tiny bit of shadow. You see a tiny blue light flicker and disappear so you inch towards it and then suddenly ...

You're in the bathroom!

And there's the bathtub! Filled to the top with ice and beers!

And a giant blue plastic tub sitting on the toilet, filled with water and bobbing apples!

Which you stick your face into and bob because voices are shouting, "BOB! BOB! BOB FOR AN APPLE!" and at this point you're so embarrassed from screaming and so shaken you do what the voices tell you, hoping to bob and then get out of that room and never show your face in the community again.

How did they do it? How did they turn a hotel room into a chamber of horrors?

TRASH BAGS!

Black plastic garbage bags, ripped into flat sheets and strips and hung from the ceiling, creating a narrow winding path weaving back and forth through the room between and around couches and furniture, like a maze, with dead-ends and obstacles. And scary stuff grabbing your thighs and ankles and lurching at your face.

And sound-effects.

The thing of it is, when you go to an official Haunted House you're emotionally prepared. On the other hand, when you go to a dance event you are definitely not expecting to walk into your friend's hotel room and have the living bejeezus scared out of you.

Next year, Tatiana says, they'll have a competition for best event-sponsored Trick Or Treat room. I don't know which event sponsored the Trash Bag Haunted House but it would have placed top five. Definite.

The Angry Gorilla girl alone would have gotten my vote.