Late at night over Columbus Day weekend, fog drifted along the first floor of NC, bloodcurdling screams filled the school, and two eerie, skeletal hands occupied the stage in the Reber Center.

“There’s something about the nature of a haunting story,” Ann Dudek, director of Ghost Stories said. “The presence of the supernatural, and why people turn good or evil, it’s very popular in our culture.”

After months of preparation, LT junior and senior ensemble members performed their play, Ghost Stories, in the Reber Center on Oct. 8,9, and 10. Centralized around a campfire, the play was a compilation of 26 short horror stories that came about as a result of research conducted by the cast. Stories included local spooky tales, such as Resurrection Mary, more general ghost stories like Bloody Mary and the Irish Banshee, and then scary fictions crafted by a few ensemble members that are entirely original.

“We have 19 members that are part of ensemble and all of them have crafted a story that contributes to the storyline,” Dudek said. “It’s been a collaboration of everybody.”

The cast spent the summer researching stories, and continued into the first week of school. After the second week of school the students began working on the play on a daily basis. They spent hours in the classroom, brainstorming, and then they spent a couple weeks in the library typing up scripts.

“Writing it was hard,” Amy Fatora ’17 said. “You’d have a good idea, but then it would be hard to put that idea into words. You can envision something, but then you can’t write it, and you just hit a wall.”

Following the script type-up, there were read-throughs, and then it was onto full staging mode. Staging, refining, fine-tuning and polishing, the cast worked very hard, Dudek said. Over the three days the play was performed, the house attendance was 302 people. Proceeds from the tickets went to funding the general costs of the nine shows that the junior and senior ensemble perform throughout their season.

“There are certain people that really enjoy horror stories,” Fatora said. “I think they would really enjoy this play because it’s not just one big, long play, it’s a bunch of little stories, so you get a taste of a bunch of different things.”