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It's dusk on Halloween, and you're all dressed up for trick-or-treating. What better way to start out the night than a trip through a haunted house?

"We went in the dark, and it was scary," said Madelin Stolen as she and her family came out of the Clarkfield Haunted house through a maze of spider webs.

"It was scary," agreed Madelin's brother Ethan Stolen - although he had a smile on his face. "We saw Spiderman. He didn't make it out."

Several Halloween events including the haunted house and Residence HALLoween at Southwest Minnesota State University were held Saturday night, offering everything from fun for kids to scares for grown-ups. And it didn't take long to see that the visitors were having as much fun as the people working the events.

"It's really fun when you get to scare people. And you get to make some of the scenes yourself," said volunteer Alex Grinager, who was busy "haunting" an evil nursery inside the house.

Organizers of the haunted house said it took a while to think up some good rooms for this year's show. The house had to be adapted to the open space inside the Clarkfield city hall building.

"The hardest part was just coming up with these frames. It's PVC pipe," said volunteer Laurie Laleman, pointing out some of the framework holding up the walls of the house.

The organizers also thought up plenty of scare effects, like a hallway full of hanging body bags visitors had to shoulder through.

"Eww, gross!" said Jennifer Irvine as she and a group of friends dashed ahead of the bags. It was a different part of the house that really got to her, though.

"The snakes in the dark were pretty creepy," Irvine said after they were out of the house.

Most of the trick-or-treat stations at SMSU were a lot lighter on the spooky stuff, with kids and parents enjoying goodies and playing holiday games. College students were getting into the act with costumes of their own.

"Do you think they'd let me play?" asked SMSU student Yome Nguyen as she watched a ball-toss game set up in the Sweetland Hall dorm complex. Nguyen was dressed in fuzzy pajamas and armed with a pillowcase for trick-or-treating.

Over at the Ocean Boulevard residence hall, students dressed as Barack Obama and a Secret Service agent provided the music for kids in a cakewalk.

"It was a lot of work to get all the people and get everything together," said residence assistant Emilie Doherty. "I'm thankful for the artists in the hall," she said. to help with decorating.

And how was it for the visitors? Rachel Van Keulen didn't have any complaints as she munched on a cupcake from the cakewalk.

"We're gonna go look for the level 3 places next," Van Keulen said, pulling out a campus map. Level 3 was the designation for the really scary stops on the tour. "I like the scary things better than the candy."