While downtown Perry saw the Perry-Area Chamber of Commerce’s Spook-tacular festivities, the doors of several local institutions were also thrown open Friday evening, and for a few hours the consumers ran the mad house.
In the Des Moines Area Community College Perry VanKirk Career Academy, each room was more frightful than the last as students vied for the creepiest decorating scheme. Visitors voted among seven classrooms plus a little welding shop of horrors to see whose ghouls rule.
Entries included My Bloody Laboratory in Room 110, Under the Sea in Room 112, Psyche Petting in Room 114, the Operating Room in Room 202, the Nightmare before Christmas in Room 206 and the Mystery Room in Room 208.
DMACC Perry Director Rick Carpenter said the students’ decorating “just gets scarier every year.”
Next door, the librarians at the Perry Public Library, including Library Director Mary Murphy, Children’s Librarian Suzanne Kestel and Librarian Jill Cook, treated the costumed children to little gifts of literacy.
Across the street, the ever hospitable Jay and Denise Hartz, owners of the Hotel Pattee, greeted visitors and treated the children in return for their tricks.
Across town, the Dallas County Hospital in Perry hosted its annual Safe and Healthy Halloween Trick or Treat event, with many well known characters from children’s entertainment lining the halls of the hospital, from old bats to babes in arms.
DCH CEO Angela Mortoza said she was “afraid to guess how many little goblin have passed through these halls in just the first hour.”
Up the street at the Perry Health Care Center, scary little visitors were greeted at the door and then ran the gauntlet, with many residents handing out treats to mutant ninjas and Disney princesses. The bravest visited the West Wing, where unspeakable terrors were created with flashlights and fluorescent paint.
Perry Health Care Center Activity Director Mary Means said the “crowd was bigger this year, and the residents love having the little ones come through.”
Perry Health Care Center Administrator Doug Wood was on hand to greet visitors and share the scares.
