MOUNT CARMEL - High school can sometimes be a scary place.
On the weekend before Halloween, the Mount Carmel Area Junior-Senior High School will be even scarier.
Students are preparing to present the sixth annual "Haunted High" from 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 27, and 6 to 9 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 28. The event will benefit a nonprofit organization of the students' choosing.
Advisers Cory Lombardo and Meghan Wasilewski, of the English and physical education departments respectively, are assisting 45 students from grades seven through 12 in creating ghoulish props and designs that will transform ordinary hallways into aisles of terror.
Guests will enter the school through the gymnasium doors on the west side of the building. From there, guests will encounter students dressed in an array of scary outfits on the first and second floors of the darkened school. The Haunted High will feature a "dot" room, a "movie theater" and a clown room.
"It will be student-made decorations, not plastic stuff from Walmart," Lombardo said. "It's one of the unique things about it."
Lombardo said the most important part of the event is that it is student led. Groups of students meet after school nearly every day to work and discuss the project. On Monday, around 10 students cut and pasted large pieces of cardboard for a forest maze, while other students sifted through an assortment of scary masks. Students traded ideas on how props and rooms should be designed.
"There might be a zombie section, but we are still in the planning phase," Lombardo said. "There will be a lot of art-based rooms. The main thing is that students are getting involved and they are having fun doing it."