Cal Poly students combined engineering and theater to build a haunted house on campus this Halloween through a collaboration between Cal Poly Amusement Park Engineering Design (CAPED) and Student Stage. The Haunted House opens Friday night and will also be open on Halloween Night.
The project began last spring, with students developing engineering plans, designing layouts and determining how to construct the attraction inside a black box theater.
According to project co-lead Matthew Blanchard, the theater’s existing walls, overhead lighting grid and entrance and exit made it a “perfect” location for the attraction.
“What’s so perfect about this space is that it is designed for sets. It’s designed for something like this,” Blanchard said.
The collaboration brought together students with different academic backgrounds and technical experience.
Designing sound
Brianna Quinlan, a second-year mechanical engineering major and theater minor, served as the lead sound designer on the Student Stage side of the project. Quinlan has five years of experience in sound design but had never worked on a haunted house before.
As a member of both CAPED and Student Stage, she said the project aligned with her interest in pursuing a career in live entertainment engineering.
“And I wanted to get involved because both of my clubs were doing something together,” Quinlan said. “And so it was the perfect opportunity for me to help out with something that I know how to do.”
Developing the attraction’s audio involved coordinating with room designers, selecting sound effects and adapting recordings as construction progressed.
Quinlan and her team compiled audio samples into a shared spreadsheet, allowing them to organize and review sounds for individual rooms.
“We were definitely thinking about what rooms are going to have more scare actors so that we can minimize the amount of voice lines that we’ll have in those tracks,” Quinlan said.
Implementing lighting and actors
Student Stage also organized workshops to prepare students for their roles as scare actors.
Lighting presented additional challenges. Luke Gilchrist, an electrical engineering major who also works with Cal Poly’s Theatre and Dance Department, helped develop the attraction’s lighting systems.
Unlike traditional theater productions, the haunted house places visitors directly inside the sets. Gilchrist said this required adjustments to how lighting fixtures were positioned and programmed.
“Something that is new for me personally and the co-lighting designer I’m working with is we want everything to trigger automatically,” Gilchrist said.
Haunted house to have inspection prior to opening
Outside the construction process, students worked with university departments to coordinate equipment, prepare safety documentation and navigate event requirements.
Blanchard said meeting fire safety requirements was among the project’s top challenges. The team prepared construction plans and documentation ahead of an on-site fire marshal inspection scheduled for opening day.
“There’s a lot of permits to do an event on campus and we are going through all the permits, which takes a lot of time and a lot of effort,” said Blanchard.
CAPED hopes to continue the haunted house in future years, allowing students to expand existing designs, develop additional animatronics and apply skills from engineering and theater coursework.
“Everything from just building to even just the documentation of it, making it a professional event on campus, it is a learn-by-doing for everything,” Blanchard said.