Ghosts, goblins find roosting spot at Eagles Lodge

A mechanical corpse points the way to the entrance of Adler’s Castle, a haunted house, as visitors prepare to go in Wednesday at the Eagles Lodge, 1803 W. Sixth St. The haunted house will be open through Halloween.

Ghouls and a graveyard are transforming the Eagles Lodge in Lawrence into Adler’s Castle — a haunted house that opened Wednesday night.

This year marks the first time that the Eagles opened its haunted house to the public, and they wanted to create spine-tingling thrills and chills.

“Last year, we tried a haunted house for the Eagles’ Halloween party, and we didn’t have a whole lot of time to prepare,” said Lucky Pollet, chairman of the Halloween committee. “I kind of wanted to redeem myself.”

Pollet started planning for this witching event in January and began building props in June.

“We wanted to do something probably not as big as the (haunted houses) in Kansas City,” Pollet said, “but something with a little more ambiance.”

That ambiance includes a multiroom setup. Visitors enter the “manor” into a dining room complete with shape-shifting portraits, and then they go into the library where a secret passage leads to a ghostly girl’s bedroom. There are several other rooms to creep through, but was it scary?

“Yes!” 5-year-old Jacob Goos said. “A werewolf was kind of scaring me a bit.”

Adler’s Castle — in the lodge at 1803 W. Sixth St. — will keep its clanging doors open for a few more days. It’s open today from 7 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. It will also be open until midnight on Friday and on Halloween. Admission is $13 a person.