Halloween: ¾

I dressed up as a doll. We went to a student haunted house in Tivoli. People dotted the street all the way up to the house, and we entered. Descending the steps, the density of people running up and down created a sense of claustrophobia for those prone to it. There were multiple rooms, and we entered to the right first.

My first impression was of the smell: a bit fishy, certainly not that of a household. Then I realized to room was filled with hay: bales of if splitting the room in two with a low fence and the rest scattered on the floor. A papier-mâché decapitated cow hung from the ceiling; a large bowl filled with inflated gloves, evoking cow udders, stood in the corner. Behind the hay fence was a creature dressed in nothing but underwear and a horse head mask. Its human hands put hay into its horse mouth, the vinyl played over and over and over.

The second room was filled with human remains mingled with dried flowers. Heads and shoulders disappeared into vegetation (From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. – Edvard Munch). It was all covered in plastic wrap. In the corner, obscured by strips of black garbage bag, someone stood cutting up what looked like slimy flesh.

To the far left was a dimly lit hallway, strips of rectangular packing material was strung from the ceiling. The first room had what looked like the remains of a suicide: no dead body, but a record of a screaming woman. Outside the room, a telephone hung off the wall: when I listened, a little boy recited nursery rhymes in a singsong voice. The next room was small, you had to crouch down and shuffle a bit before reaching an insect-bit filled refrigerator, lite by a black light and covered in insect-foam-like shaving cream. In the third hung a sign that said “babies sleeping”, jarred dolls and a softer light filled this room. There was a person with an extra arm sitting in the middle. When someone reached out to see if it was real, “can I touch it?” they asked, and the person shifted their head and shook, slowly: no.

After that we went upstairs. Behind layers of black scrim, a band played, dressed head to toe in black. Another bowl of plastic body parts stood on the couch, and I walked through the living room and found myself on the porch. I could barely move there: a girl dressed up a sushi (she was on crutches: chopsticks!) smiled and I briefly chatted with superman. Back inside I found the ladder to the attic, which led my eyes to a tv screen showing sexually morbid images, the hallway I was standing in filled with broken mirrors, the bathroom door was opened and the bathtub was filled with blood and crutches.

Eventually we escaped.