By Leslie Pantoja, Hub Editor
RPoP members rehearse for the upcoming fourth annual Haunted Tour of TTU Campus event. Photo by Carmen Alatorre.
As the night falls, only the moon and a lantern are left to guide a tour group through a chilly evening as student storytellers spew both the magical and macabre tales of Raiderland.
The Raider Power of Paranormal (RPoP) organization is set to host their annual “frightraiser,” as they present guests with a haunted tour of the Texas Tech campus while sharing bonafide and spine-chilling spooky stories related to the university on Friday, Oct. 25.
The event is sponsored by the Military & Veterans Programs, with additional student support from the School of Theatre & Dance.
Garret Langlois has been RPoP’s advisor since the organization was formalized in October of 2019 and explained what the event is about.
“It is a moment of macabre reflection – for enjoyment because it’s that season – on the history of Tech and the stories students tell, which have all been meticulously researched,” Langlois said. “There are stories that are both legends and things that students say and it’s amazing in that regard.”
There are 14 time slots available for the tour, with the first one beginning at 8 p.m and the final one at 11:15 p.m. Groups are expected to depart every 15 minutes.
The tour is set to start at the Texas Tech Dairy Barn, located at 2901 15th St., last about an hour long, and cover around 1.5 miles of the Tech campus.
Tali Russell was a member of RPoP for all four years of her time at Tech as a theatre arts major and served as president of the club for three of those. She described the types of stories that are implemented into the tour.
“All stories were researched, written and are now performed by members of the organization,” Russell said. “Some of them are true occurrences, so they’re real, tragic, or more macabre events that happened on Texas Tech campus. Some of them are what we call truly told legends, so these are ghost stories that there’s not a lot of proof of whether or not they happened, but they’re actually stories that are told in dorms and have been told for generations now.”
RPoP members rehearse for the upcoming fourth annual Haunted Tour of TTU Campus event. Photo by Carmen Alatorre.
The tour originated from a Raider Welcome Week event for RPoP known as “Fright Raider Fright,” which was initially made up of three members and their advisor, Garret, and then expanded into the production it is now with the help of the Military & Veterans Program, making this the fourth annual haunted tour.
Garret Langlois described one of the reasons he decided to become RPoP’s advisor.
“It was such a novel and compelling idea because professionally I’m an ecologist and also a thanatologist,” Langlois said. “So I thought, what an opportunity to engage students in a fun interdisciplinary fashion using death studies.”
Langlois added that the organization is free for anyone to join, but members who choose to pay the optional $10 membership per academic year do receive perks.
Aside from the haunted tour, RPoP hosts on average one general meeting or social event a week, including “Old Man Entertainment Night” (OMEN) where Langlois chooses a surprise film to screen for the organization while the members try to guess what it is from hints, “True Crime Time” where members get together to learn about and discuss one specific true crime case, visiting cemeteries to study death symbology, and more.
Tali Russell described RPoP in her own words.
“The club will do anything from presentations on things like folklore, cryptids, ghosts, aliens, all of that fun spooky stuff,” Russell said. I like to describe it as ‘imagine coming to a class, but the class is about bigfoot.’”
Russell added that anyone can be a part of RPoP.
“Whether or not you believe in ghosts or spirits, RPoP has something for everybody. If you like history, we do a lot of work surrounding that, if you’re really into folklore, we do that. It’s an amazing way to make friends that are gonna be with you for a long time and there’s always something going on.”
As of 2023, RPOP’s membership exceeded 300 students and represented over 100 different majors, making the club a way to meet new people from different cohorts, according to Langlois’ peer-reviewed journal article Phantasmagoria 101.
RPoP members rehearse for the upcoming fourth annual Haunted Tour of TTU Campus event. Photo by Carmen Alatorre.
Daniel Ozlowski, current president of the RPoP organization, expressed his favorite thing about the organization.
“I really like the kind of community and friendships that I’ve built throughout it. I’ve made some life-long friends,” Ozlowski said. “That and the new knowledge and information that I really would’ve had no way of accessing other than just looking it up on my own. All of that combined is why I love the club.”
Ozlowski encourages people to come out and experience the haunted tour for themselves.
“It’s a fun little hour-long tour that shares some stories that a lot of people likely don’t know,” Ozlowski said. “There are a lot of the legends that I had no idea about beforehand that I think are kind of fun and it’s a part of Texas Tech.”
Tickets for the haunted campus tour can be bought in-person using cash or online through the TicketSpice website.
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