After a busy night at Studebaker West, freshman Maddee Jarvis said she and her friends ran out of candy halfway through trick-or-treating at the dorms. They scrambled to the residence hall shop to buy what they could.
“I [bought] $8.50 worth of $0.25 candy,” Jarvis said. “I felt so bad for the cashiers because they had to scan every single one.”
Families from the community visited Ball State’s campus Wednesday for the annual residence hall trick-or-treating event. Dorms opened their doors to the public from 6-8 p.m, giving trick-or-treaters free candy and offering activities like crafts and movies.
Students waited near their rooms for kids to stop by and pick up sweets. Several on-campus residents ran out of candy to distribute that they had to put up “out of candy” signs and shut their doors for the evening.
Junior human resource management major Kaitlyn Walsh and sophomore nursing major Morgan Poole said they had a shortage of candy last year, so they bought several large candy bags for Wednesday.
“This time, we were more prepared with our candy,” Walsh said.
Kinghorn Hall played the Peanuts franchise movie, “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” and set up a coloring area with Halloween-themed pages. Park Hall featured Día de los Muertos coloring activities.
“Well we kind of wanted to go for a day of the dead theme, but because there is so much chaos we didn’t incorporate it a lot, but we did with the coloring pages,” said Lyndsey Rudolph, vice president of programming at Park’s residence hall council.
Students in charge of their residence hall activities said setup for the trick-or-treating event was the biggest time consumer for this year’s event.
“It took about 30-45 minutes because we had to go to the [Multi Purpose Room] and we had to set up all the decorations and another part of our team went around and hung up the arrows for trick-or-treating,” Rudolph said.
According to Amy Brown, residence hall director at Park, her dorm’s goal was to get 900 visitors.
“We’re running the grilled cheese as an opportunity to fundraise with DeHority residents and other residents from Muncie in the city as well,” said Missy Backs, a resident assistant at Dehority Hall.
Residence halls were given freedom to organize their activities and general trick-or-treating.
Sean O’Melia, Noyer Hall’s residence hall director, volunteered to coordinate this year’s event.
“It’s a great way to show Ball State cares about the community, and we don’t want it to be separate,” O’Melia said.
The dorm trick-or-treating, he said, was one of many opportunities for young students to visit Ball State and consider the college as one of their future education options. He said it’s neat to see students of all levels, from elementary school to graduate school, interacting together.
“A lot of [kids] are probably going to the same houses,” O’Melia said. “I know, when I was trick-or-treating, I would always see the same people and same houses, but I think it’s really cool to interact with a lot of different people and see a college — I would have loved to have done that as a kid.”
Contact Bailey Cline with comments at bacline@bsu.edu or on Twitter @BaileyCline. Contact Jaden Hasse with comments at jdhasse@bsu.edu or on Twitter @HasseJaden.