Haunted Tour of TTU Campus
The Haunted Tour of TTU Campus is a fundraising event put on every October by the Texas Tech University student organization, Raider Power of Paranormal (RPOP). The Haunted Tour is a one-night only experience in which groups of “tourists” are led by a “tour guide” around a 1.5 mile tour route of the campus. Along the way, there are a series of stops in which “Dramatic Storytellers” will regale dark and mysterious stories of TTU’s past, some fictional, some grounded in real events of the campus’ past. These stories cover ghosts, killings, and more. The Haunted Tour aims to preserve the campus’ history and legends, further connect students and members of the community to the school and its past, and to raise money for local veterans.
I was asked to help with the Haunted Tour as an “Ambience Engineer”, someone charged with designing and implementing various elements along the tour route in order to create a spooky and engaging atmosphere (I ended up also serving as a Dramatic Storyteller, as pictured above). Between the two other Ambience Engineers, I was assigned to specifically curating the aural environment. Provided with four bluetooth speakers, and a couple of assistants, I had to be very selective with which parts of the tour to reinforce with sound design. I supplied two more speakers of my own, which helped give me some more agency and cover more of the tour stops. Ultimately I decided to try and spread out the use of sounds fairly evenly, covering three stops in the first half and three in the second half. Per the director’s request, one speaker was placed at the final stop to play fun Halloween music with the conclusion. Additionally, I provided the director with some advising for where to place the storytellers in consideration of where they could be most clearly heard.
Pictured to the right is a map of the route for RPOP’s Haunted Tour that I labeled to show where sound reinforcement was provided. Each ghost symbol represents a stop where a Dramatic Storyteller gives their performance. The yellow circles indicate tour stops with sound reinforcement. You can listen to what played at each tour stop below.
The “Library Child” story tells of witness accounts of hearing the whispers of a child-like ghost in the TTU library late at night, so for this story I hid a speaker at the bottom of a nearby underground staircase that played ghostly whispers for tourists to hear as they left for the next tour stop.
Audio Samples
The “Med. School Cadavers” story recalls how the School of Medicine used to collect real cadavers and bring them to the basement for studying. For this story I hid a speaker in a nearby tree that played a soundscape of someone dragging a body down the basement stairs across the floor.
The “Tunnel Creeper” details the rumor of a student who once used the underground tunnel system to access the all-girls dorm hall at night, but that one day he got locked down there and no one rescued him because the tunnels are visited so rarely. For this, I actually reused the same sound effect that had been created the year before by the previous sound designer, Oliver Loll. I placed the speaker under one of the grates that is inlaid into the sidewalk that the crowd took immediately proceeding the “Tunnel Creeper” story.
The “Lady Doak” story tells of witness accounts claiming that in Doak Hall, late at night, you can sometimes here the ghost of Lady Doak playing the piano that is located in an otherwise empty room on the top floor that can actually be found. For this tour stop, I hid a speaker on a windowsill of Doak Hall that played ghostly piano music both as the crowd approached and left.
“Brian the Grad Student” tells a story of a chemical science student who sought vengeance after convincing himself that the reason his experiments always failed was that he was being sabotaged by other students, leading him to becoming psychotic. For this story, I created a full length soundscape that accompanied the story as it was being told, timed out so the glass shattered on the climax of the story. The soundscape depicts Brian entering a lab alone and trying to perform an experiment that ultimately fails.